BY TIM JOHNSON

 LA ARMENIA, Ecuador -- Toppled President Jamil Mahuad said Tuesday that
 Ecuador remains more unstable than ever and suggested that his successor runs
 the risk of getting thrown out of office as well.

 ``The precedent that we have set is terrible,'' Mahuad said at a ranch home
 outside of Quito four days after his ouster in a military uprising.

 Mahuad said he would not interfere with his successor, Gustavo Noboa, who was
 his vice president. But he declined to grant clear legitimacy to Noboa's
 three-day-old government, which has been recognized by most nations in the
 hemisphere.

 ``I neither accept it nor don't accept it. I simply acknowledge it,'' he said,
 asserting that the new government was getting ``lukewarm'' treatment from
 abroad.

 Mahuad forecast ``tremendously difficult'' times for Noboa and politely declined to
 say whether he believed Noboa would last until his term ends in early 2003.

 ``To govern the country under these conditions is tremendously difficult, for
 Gustavo Noboa or any other person,'' Mahuad said. ``I see what awaits him. . . .
 What's coming is very tough.''

 Dozens of army officers joined an indigenous protest against Mahuad last Friday
 that seized Congress and declared a three-man ruling junta. Mahuad fled the
 presidential palace. Before dawn on Saturday, the military backed down and let
 the vice president take over the top job. While Mahuad actually did not resign,
 Congress said he abandoned the job because he entered the Chilean Embassy,
 effectively foreign territory, for a few hours late Friday.

 Speaking serenely on the terrace of a country estate belonging to a friend,
 Mahuad said junior and senior military officers conspired with a restive and angry
 indigenous movement to remove him from the presidency.

 ``What guarantees does a country have when 4,000 people, plus 80 junior-level
 officers and two, three or five high-level officers use these strategies to change a
 president?'' Mahuad asked.

 SHORT PRESIDENCIES

 Ecuador has had six presidents in four years.

 Mahuad said the nation remains deeply divided, adding that Indians who cast their
 lot with military renegades feel ``terribly betrayed.''

 ``Things are in more turmoil after this [coup], not in less turmoil,'' he said.

 Mahuad described as ``absolutely and totally false'' accusations that his own
 administration may have plotted to shut down Congress in a power grab at several
 points during its 17-month duration.

 Speaking publicly for the second time since his removal from office, Mahuad told
 some 20 foreign correspondents he had received calls of support from the leaders
 of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru and Spain.

 ``President Chavez called,'' he added, referring to Hugo Chavez, the former
 paratrooper who launched an unsuccessful coup in Venezuela in 1992, only to
 win the presidency in 1998.

 CHAVEZ FACSIMILE?

 One of the colonels who led the Ecuadorean uprising, Col. Lucio Gutierrez, has
 been compared to Chavez. Another officer, Col. Guillermo Pacheco, sought
 political asylum in Venezuela on Monday. In his asylum request, Pacheco
 echoed Chavez's famous remark in 1992 that his rebellion was over -- ``for now.''

 Pacheco said he would one day return to Ecuador ``to found a new republic. . . .''

 Talk of revolt still reverberates among the National Confederation of Indigenous
 Nations, Ecuador's most powerful Indian group.

 One of the members of the short-lived three-man junta, confederation leader
 Antonio Vargas, said Tuesday that if prosecutor Mariana Yepez carries out her
 threat to jail him on sedition charges, Indians will rise up immediately.

 Noboa, the newly installed president, said Monday that the judiciary is
 independent but that he sympathizes with the nation's four million or so
 impoverished Indians.

 He criticized the Mahuad government for making promises in March to indigenous
 people, only to ignore them and face new protests in July.

 ``What I sign my name to, I carry it out,'' Noboa told correspondents.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald