Correa: not so radical, sez NYT
[in the print ed, this was set ragged right, so we know it’s not hard
news!]
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.