New York Times - November 28, 2006
News Analysis Ecuador Vote: Leader Forges Middle Road Among Leftists
By SIMON ROMERO
QUITO, Ecuador, Nov. 27 — The walls in the office of Rafael Correa, the economist who seems almost certain to be this oil-exporting country’s next president, are decorated with photos of leftist leaders in Latin America whom he admires, including Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia.
But when Mr. Correa starts talking about his ideas, in rapid-fire Spanish interspersed with tangents in English, French and even the occasional phrase in Quechua, he conveys a more sophisticated image than the nationalists who have risen to power elsewhere in the region out of the armed forces or trade unions.
“Foreign investment that generates wealth and jobs and pays taxes will always be welcome,” Mr. Correa, 43, said in an interview here, sounding precisely like someone with postgraduate degrees from universities in the United States and Belgium. (His are from the University of Illinois and Catholic University of Leuven, where he met his Belgian wife, Anne Malherbe.)
Mr. Correa, between declarations of admiration for the American political system and the Democratic Party in the United States, added that investors could look forward to his government, which would “strictly follow the rule of law.”
Yet the markets wasted little time trying to decipher who the real Mr. Correa may be. Skeptical speculators in New York and London engaged in a sell-off of Ecuadorean bonds on Monday as concern grew that Mr. Correa would carry out promises to renegotiate Ecuador’s $10.4 billion of foreign debt.
And Mr. Correa still seems intent on pressing forward with popular proposals, like limiting American influence by not renewing an agreement, which expires in 2009, that allows the United States military to operate from a Pacific coast base.
In some ways, Mr. Correa’s rise points to how varied, and persistent, the leftist groundswell has become in Latin America. He had 68 percent of the votes cast Sunday, compared with 32 percent for his opponent, Álvaro Noboa, with about half of ballot boxes counted by Monday; final results were expected Tuesday.
A former finance minister, Mr. Correa wears tailored suits and chats about how North American economists like John Kenneth Galbraith have influenced him. Yet before crowds, he rails against the Bush administration and the International Monetary Fund.
The competing strands make any hasty judgment on Mr. Correa premature, particularly as he finds his way in the unstable world of Ecuadorean politics, where Congress can oust unpopular presidents with ease.
Vying to become Ecuador’s eighth president in 10 years, Mr. Correa seemed prepared in recent weeks to moderate his speeches, and perhaps even his ideas, when he fell behind Mr. Noboa, a banana tycoon.
Stung by Mr. Noboa’s description of him as someone who would wreak economic chaos, Mr. Correa reached out to chambers of commerce and the American ambassador, Linda Jewell. Mr. Correa toned down references to a polarizing proposal for an assembly to rewrite the Constitution that could eventually give him authority to dissolve Congress.
And after losing in the first round to Mr. Noboa, Mr. Correa was also more nimble in his use of new campaign technologies from the United States. For instance, Mr. Correa in the past month adeptly had his supporters post videos of gaffes by Mr. Noboa on the Web site YouTube.
Though those images reached relatively few Ecuadoreans, they created a cascade of comments, particularly among young voters, and enabled Mr. Correa to bypass the concerns of the news media, which had been hesitant to explicitly criticize Mr. Noboa, Ecuador’s richest man with a fortune of $1.2 billion.
It remains to be seen whether the agility of his campaign was merely a function of tactics, or a reflection of a new kind of leftist leader in the region. Even if the markets were not willing to give Mr. Correa the benefit of the doubt, others were. “If his campaign was any indication, we’ll see a Correa who is more flexible and pragmatic than dogmatic,” said Hugo Barber, director of Datanálisis, a political analysis firm.
Mr. Barber said he expected Mr. Correa to emerge as a moderate leftist more along the lines of President Néstor Kirchner of Argentina than as a leader embracing the militaristic socialist rhetoric of Mr. Chávez.
Mr. Correa said he looked forward to stronger ties with Venezuela, but unlike leaders in Bolivia or Nicaragua, he does not currently need Mr. Chávez’s aid. “Correa is going to be a friend, not a client of Chávez,” said Michael Shifter, an analyst for a Washington-based policy institute, Inter-American Dialogue, who was in Quito for the election.
Mr. Correa has the luxury of inheriting an economy that is benefiting from a combination of high oil prices, a tax increase on oil companies and the seizure this year of a crucial oil concession held by Occidental Petroleum of Los Angeles, which had been Ecuador’s largest foreign investor.
Together, those factors have given oil revenues a boost of $1 billion this year, according to the credit ratings company Fitch Ratings. Of course, this reliance on oil exposes Ecuador to a crash if oil prices sharply decline; they are already down nearly 20 percent from midyear highs.
That is what makes some of Mr. Correa’s ideas, like rejoining OPEC, strengthening the national oil company Petroecuador, or renegotiating the foreign debt, troubling to some analysts here. Ecuador is supposed to remember the pain, they say, of past oil busts.
The country left OPEC in the early 1990s when it had trouble paying its dues. Since then, Ecuador has had a debilitating dependence on imported gasoline because of inadequate refining operations.
Mr. Correa will come to the presidency with virtually no support from a recalcitrant Congress that reflects, however imperfectly, a country whose instability has resulted in two million Ecuadoreans emigrating to the United States and Europe.
“Any government will have difficulty conciliating the demands of a highly mobilized and very volatile public that is impatient for results and now used to bringing pressure and being successful at it,” said Kenneth Maxwell, a professor of Latin American history at Harvard.