Election day in Ecuador

Submitted by fyl on Sun, 2013/02/17 - 07:46.

Today is election day in Ecuador. President Rafael Correa is way ahead in the polls and most people seem to have good reasons why they support Correa. In the 10 years prior to his initial election in 2007, Ecuador went through seven presidents. Stability alone is a huge plus.

There are lots of articles about Ecuador and the election out there right now. I have picked a couple that seem to offer some reasonable information about what's going on.

The first is from AFP titled Correa, the brash leftist who stabilized Ecuador.

He is often described as charismatic and hard-working, but also brash with authoritarian tendencies. Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa admits it himself: He wasn't elected to be Mr. Nice Guy.

The other article is from AlJazeera and it titled Ecuador prepares for presidential vote. This article talks about his competition.

Lasso, who was finance minister during an economic crisis in the 1990s, has struggled to woo voters, with polls showing that only 10 percent would vote for him.

The other candidates include former president Lucio Gutierrez, a retired army colonel who was ousted by Congress amid a popular revolt in 2005, and the country's richest man, Alvaro Noboa.

Correa has brought a measure of political stability to Ecuador, which had seven presidents in the turbulent decade that preceded him, including three who were overthrown.

While the mainstream media, particularly that of the US, tend to label him as "Ecuador's Chávez", he has detractors in Ecuador who you would associate with what we tend to call "the left". His policies seem to be well thought out and well aligned with what Ecuador needs. Today's vote, mandatory for citizens from 18 to 65, should show us how well that plays out.

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CounterPunch

Submitted by fyl on Tue, 2013/02/19 - 15:35.

Yet another look at Correa, this time from Counter Punch.

It fills in a lot of background, compares Correa's ability to come through on election promises (as opposed to, for example, Obama) and, probably most important, shows that he is really a new player with his own ideas rather than just another recycled politician.

Here’s what you need to know. Rafael Correa was a nobody on the political scene in Ecuador when George W. Bush was being inaugurated for the second time in Washington 8 years ago. I know. It’s not polite to bring up such ugly episodes in US history but allow me to refresh your memory for a second. Bush just beat the current Secretary of State John Kerry in the November election and presumed he had a mandate. He was talking about going after Social Security. The left, right and center were paying close attention. It turns out though, that Bush’s victory was an incredibly narrow one, with allegations of strange occurrences in Ohio, people being forced to wait in line for hours around the country and corporations spending ever more on getting their representatives elected.[ii] All in all, the result was a US democracy looking less and less like an established fact, and more and more like some kind of disturbing case of regression back into the “good old days” of black, brown, poor, and those with some form of exploitable vulnerability being prevented from voting because they were black, brown, poor or vulnerable. No matter though. Both Kerry and Bush were rather familiar politicians, both extremely wealthy, both went to Yale and both even played in the same dark dungeons there.

Election results

Submitted by fyl on Mon, 2013/02/18 - 06:22.

As was expected, Correa won reelection. A Reuters article says he got 57% of the vote. It is likely that his party won a majority in Congress.

The article has the usual rhetoric about him in the first part but goes on to offer some useful insight.

The advantages of our country for foreign investment are political stability, a strong macroeconomic performance ... and important stimulus to new private investment," he said last week while hosting Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the emir of gas-rich Qatar.

But in comments after his win on Sunday, he stressed that investment was not an end but a means to ensure growth. He promised Ecuador would not "mortgage" itself for foreign cash.

Foreign direct investment has generally been less than $1 billion a year since Correa took office in 2007. By comparison, neighboring Peru and Colombia last year received $7.7 billion and $13 billion, respectively.

It would be interesting to see how much of that foreign direct investment in Colombia and Peru is related to the US government vs. real business investment.

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