BY TIM JOHNSON

 QUITO, Ecuador -- Forty-eight hours after some 50 army officers helped topple
 Ecuador's elected president, only one junior officer appears to have been thrown
 in jail. The remainder enjoy their freedom.

 While the renegade officers remain unpunished, the newly installed civilian
 government of President Gustavo Noboa on Sunday showed little interest in
 confronting the military over the coup or demanding a purge of army radicals.

 ``I don't see civil society as capable of pressuring the armed forces on this matter.
 Not now,'' said Bertha Garcia Gallegos, a Catholic University political scientist
 and military expert. ``This is very worrisome.''

 Noboa, the 62-year-old vice president whom Congress installed a day earlier as
 the nation's leader, entered the presidential palace early Sunday telling
 bystanders his government would offer ``peace, progress and justice.''

 Hours later, Noboa announced a skeleton Cabinet, including Interior Minister
 Francisco Huerta, whom he left to field questions. Journalists queried him
 insistently over how the government would punish officers who took part in
 Friday's coup.

 ``The subject is complicated,'' Huerta said. ``All of them will go to military
 tribunals, as the law calls for. We have no alternative.''

 Huerta said he did not know how many officers had been jailed.

 But a variety of radio, TV and newspaper reports said the only officer detained
 after Friday's uprising was Lucio Gutierrez, an army colonel who helped
 thousands of Indian protesters seize Congress and the Supreme Court, an act
 that led President Jamil Mahuad to flee the palace and allow a three-man junta to
 briefly take power. The military backed down Saturday morning, allowing Noboa to
 assume the presidency.

 During Friday's turmoil, Gutierrez was accompanied by other mid-level officers,
 many enthusiastically supporting the coup.

 ``There was a group of some 50 officers,'' Garcia said.

 FRUSTRATED OFFICERS

 The widespread participation revealed the frustration that many officers feel at
 what they see as ineffective and corrupt civilian leadership.

 ``It is touchy for the country that dozens of junior army officers would react so
 favorably to anti-democratic methods,'' the El Comercio newspaper said in an
 editorial.

 If army ranks aren't purged quickly, a split between radicals and those loyal to
 constitutional rule will widen, Garcia said.

 ``There has to be a drastic purge in the armed forces,'' she said.

 Many of the officers were associated with Ecuador's War College, a bastion of
 idealism run by Col. Fausto Cobo, who showed up at Congress and shouted
 enthusiastic slogans in favor of military rule.

 ``Have we looted the country? No! We are here so that they  don't loot the
 country!'' Cobo shouted to supporters demanding the overthrow of the unpopular
 Mahuad government.

 By Friday evening, other officers were calling TV stations to pronounce their
 support for the Junta of National Salvation.

 COUP LONG PLANNED

 ``We want a structural change of society,'' army Col. Guillermo Pacheco said,
 declaring that a coup had been in the works for months. ``We have been carrying
 out this struggle, logically, for a long time.''

 Another rebel officer, Maj. Victor Avenatti, demurred when he was told that not all
 Ecuadoreans favored a de facto civilian-military junta.

 ``People have decided that we should take over, and we are going to do it to bring
 discipline to Ecuador and to work,'' he said.

 Others active in the insurrection included Cols. Gustavo Lalama and Jorge Brito
 and Gen. Carlos Moncayo, who permitted the protesters to overrun the Congress,
 TV footage of the turmoil showed. By late Friday, the army's senior commander,
 Gen. Carlos Mendoza, said he would sit on the ruling junta.

 Mendoza backed down before dawn Saturday, saying he would leave the army.

 GENERAL GETS PRAISE

 Huerta, the interior minister, had nothing but praise for the onetime armed forces
 commander.

 ``He has sacrificed a brilliant career so that the world would not see the spectacle
 of a disoriented, destroyed Ecuador,'' he said.

 While Huerta applauded the role of Mendoza, a former defense minister, Gen.
 Jose Gallardo, described him as a ``traitor'' for overthrowing democracy.

 ``He set the armed forces back a century,'' Gallardo said. ``I think the armed
 forces must be rescued and given dignified leadership.''

 Huerta pleaded publicly with Gallardo to avoid provocation and harm to ``the unity
 of the armed forces.''

 Some civilians suggested that radical officers should quit the military as Lt. Col.
 Hugo Chavez did after leading a failed coup in Venezuela in 1992. Last year,
 Chavez assumed the presidency after winning elections in a landslide.

 ``All of them should leave the army, form a political party just like Chavez did in
 Venezuela. This is the dignified thing to do. Form a party, quit the army and
 compete in elections,'' said Francisco Alarcon, president of the Chamber of
 Industrialists of Guayas province on the Pacific coast.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald