Shite... imagine if that are your choices for the president of your country for the next 4 years... welcome to Ecuador!
The elections here were different from what I expected, based in my Latin-American experience... 13 candidates, and 2 went on... and pretty much at the extremes of the spectrum... and no party/carnival atmosphere as it happens in the rest of the continent.
The stage
Ecuador has just 13m people and a $40 billion economy and the elections went for a new Congress and part of the provincial and municipal legislatures as well as the presidency.
Enter Mr Correa
Here is good line that says a lot: After Mr Chávez compared George Bush to the devil Mr Correa wondered whether the devil would take offence. He opposes a free-trade agreement with the United States, even though neighboring Colombia and Peru have each signed one, and intends to shut the American military base in Manta. He threatens to follow Argentina's example in defaulting on Ecuador's $10 billion foreign debt, the third such default in little more than 20 years. Mr Correa's victory, many fear, would push Ecuador into the club of Latin American countries that revile the United States and use the oil revenues to defy economic gravity.
He is a “fresh” option because Ecuador's political and economic system has been so thoroughly discredited. Street protests have toppled three presidents in the past decade, most recently in April 2005, when Lucio Gutiérrez was thrown out. Political parties are little more than fronts for the business interests of their leaders. The courts are regarded as creatures of the same oligarchs, who plunder the budget and state-owned companies such as Petroecuador, the country's biggest oil company. “We want total change,” says one of the blokes I work with.
Correa means to deliver it by summoning a constituent assembly “with full powers” to sweep away the “dictatorship of the parties”. He has already made it difficult, should he win, to govern within the traditional political framework. He has fielded no congressional candidates, although the tiny Socialist Party backs him. Congress is thus likely to be dominated by the political parties he intends to destroy. The problem is that if he makes it, how hard will the old order strike back?
No one really know what sort of president he would be, he is quite articulate, I followed is discourse over the time... interesting at the beginning, but totally discredited over the last days...
The guy is smart, he has PhD in economics form some American University, and was last year plucked from obscurity as a professor at a private university to be economy minister under the outgoing president, Alfredo Palacio. As in Venezuela, oil fattens the revenues of Ecuador's government, he became a popular hero by dismantling a fund meant primarily for paying debt in order to boost social spending and was soon forced out (under pressure from Ecuador's foreign creditors, his defenders allege).
He is not really like Chavez, but that is the image that opposition wants to portray, to start he is not (and has never been) a military, he is a devoted catholic (not being catholic here would be political suicide anyway), he worked for a year a s a voluntary in a school in the highland, so he speaks quechua (the main aboriginal language) and that was a killer point for his mountain voters, as well as English and French (did a post grad in Belgium, and is married to one).
He is quite pragmatic as well, while he opposes Ecuador's use of the dollar as its currency, which has brought low inflation, but does not plan to stop it. The constituent assembly, he suggests, will strengthen democratic institutions rather than undermining them. He wants to “depoliticise the courts”, conduct a “deep reform” of the government bureaucracy and have congressmen elected by district rather than by province, making them more accountable to their electorates.
The masses like that, but the problem is that Congress will resist Correa's call to drown itself in his constitutional deluge. The army, still the final arbiter in Ecuadorean affairs, is likely to take its side.
Correa does to appeal to the people, but they will follow only so far, Ecuador's are sustained in part by the middle class. Conditions are wretched. Despite years of oil-fuelled growth, more than half the population lives below the poverty line; a similar proportion is underemployed or jobless. Yet Ecuador's unrest is provoked less by deprivation than by anger at a grasping elite. That has fed Correa's support but may also put limits on it. If elected, he may not last long.
His victory is far from certain. He got far, but some are turned off by his radicalism, and some would be surely go the other way, based in his resentment and full on paranoia after the results of the election... he claims fraud, and that everyone is against him... he may loose not by the merits of the opposition, but against a anti Correa coalition...
Enter Mr Noboa
This guy is soooooo unappealing.... honestelly he has serious problems coordinating his hands movements and his speech... small and fluffy, he looks more like a character that never made it to the tele-tubbies than a president...His dad was the richest man Ecuador, a self made guy, a banana magnate, with scores of other companies... but this guy does not has the best of brains... he ran for president twice before, and now has run a sickening and flagrantly populist campaign. Proclaiming himself “God's messenger”, (for real!) he distributes T-shirts in poor villages, promises jobs and housing and ministers to the sick with his “Álvaro Noboa Medical Brigade”, get on his knees to pray for the health of old ladies carefully “appearing” on his way... Many suspects that his clearest vision is of the welfare of the banana trade, and fear a banana republic.
From his policy perspective he promotes enterprise, investment and trade, all of which Ecuador’s oil-dependent economy sorely needs, and of course, he embraces big time the free-trade agreement with America. But the big worry is how “Albarito” Noboa would reconcile the presidency with his extensive business interests. Rather than resolve the inevitable conflicts of interest, many Ecuadoreans fear that he intends to follow Italy’s exp president Silvio Berlusconi in using his businesses to promote his political ambitions and vice versa. That mix of private and political gain is exactly what Correa has campaigned against. So next month Ecuadoreans, (as Peruvians before them) have to chose in between the less of two extremes... or as a taxi driver today told me... is like I have to chose in between cancer and aids....
