QUITO, Ecuador (AP) - Gunmen waiting in ambush assassinated a
                   leading Ecuadorean politician and former presidential candidate
                   Wednesday as he left the legislature in Quito.

                   Jaime Hurtado, 62, a Marxist congressman and vocal opponent of
                   President Jamil Mahuad's economic austerity plans, died an hour after
                   gunmen ambushed him while he walked to his car. Two assistants also
                   were killed.

                   ''The deputy left the building with his two bodyguards when they were
                   intercepted by three subjects who fired six shots with their guns,'' Lt. Luis
                   Padilla, head of Congress' security, told reporters.

                   The gunmen have not been captured and no one has claimed responsibility
                   for the attack, police said.

                   Hurtado, who devoted much of his life to union causes, lost a presidential
                   bid to conservative Leon Febres Cordero in 1984.

                   He was a congressman for the Marxist Popular Democratic Movement
                   party, and was just returning from a news conference criticizing the
                   government for its treatment of striking teachers under the austerity
                   measures.

                   Students and union members have staged often-violent street protests with
                   dozens of arrests to force the government to repeal the measures, which
                   included ending subsidies on electricity, diesel oil and cooking gas.

                   Ecuador's largest labor federation had called two general strikes against
                   the austerity measures, which Mahuad has argued were necessary to
                   rescue this poor Andean nation from bankruptcy and its ''worst crisis in 70
                   years.''

                   To protect its dwindling foreign reserves, the government last week
                   eliminated the band within which the national currency was allowed to be
                   traded, effectively devaluing the sucre.

                   Polls showed Mahuad's popularity falling and the protests gaining support
                   among Ecuadoreans as prices rose and the austerity measures took effect.

                   Members of Hurtado's party and union leaders blamed government
                   supporters for the slaying.

                   ''We are the stone in the shoe of this government,'' a weeping Maria
                   Eugenia Lima, a congresswoman for Hurtado's party, said after hearing of
                   his murder.

                   Defense Minister Jose Gallardo condemned the attack, but the
                   government has not released an official response to Hurtado's murder.
 
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