The Latino Obama?

05/05/2009

Rafael Correa has been re-elected president of Ecuador, but the political star faces huge challenges

by Henry Mance
in Ecuador


Is this what hope looks like after two years in power? Rafael Correa – a little stockier, greyer and hoarser – bounces onto the stage, hugging just about anyone he can get his arms around.

The rally is meant to mark the end of his re-election campaign. In fact, the president of Ecuador is already celebrating. He starts off with some group karaoke – one number about Che Guevara, another proclaiming that “the people united will never be defeated” and finally, ‘Tropical Banana’, a bizarre song about Ecuador’s role as a commodities exporter.

Only when the president starts to speak does something resembling decorum set in. “We’ve kept our word!” he bellows at the ecstatic crowd. “The citizens’ revolution is happening and nothing can stop it!” Next to me, a star-struck old man chokes, “a great president, a great president”.

Around us, hundreds of supporters wave lime-green flags bearing prints of Correa’s face, the striking image he first used in 2006 as an affront to the traditional political colours and mug shots. It was Barack Obama-style advertising, before Obama entered our consciousness. Four days after the rally, Correa’s celebrations were proved right.

He was re-elected on April 26 in the first round of voting – the first time in three decades a candidate has won without having to go to a second round – in an unprecedented feat of popularity in Ecuador.
 
Ecuador is a dreamy world of turtles, jungles, beer for breakfast, and indigenous women carrying babies across their backs – as any bus-beaten backpackers will tell you.

However, it is also a political volcano. Since 1997, economic crisis and massive corruption have led to three presidents being ousted from office. The first victim, now exiled in Panama, won the nickname “El Loco” when as president he released an album titled El Loco que Ama (The Madman who Loves).

So, in a country where the tourists sometimes stay longer than the presidents, what makes Correa different? “There’s a yearning for change and Correa has presented himself as someone who is sincere, whatever mistakes he may make,” says the pollster Santiago Peréz. “His best allies have been his very opponents, those traditional politicians who keep doing politics in the same outdated ways.”

Change and slick advertising, yes, but the Ecuadorian president is not a conciliator like Obama. If there’s an opportunity to insult someone, he’ll probably take it. Environmentalists and indigenous groups are “imbeciles”. One of his rivals in the election, Ecuador’s richest man is a “big-bellied oligarch”. The press are “part of the structure of corruption and accomplices of the national disaster”.

But insults are not a bad tactic in a country fed up with its politics. Then there’s Rafael Correa’s affinity with Hugo Chávez. Gordon Brown et al may have declared the Washington Consensus dead, but the two Bolivarians (supporters of a political ideology named after Simon Bolivar, the 19th century general and liberator of much of South America) have been dancing on its grave for some time.

When Chávez compared George Bush to Satan, Correa chimed in that it was unfair to the devil. Yet most of the time Correa is happy to leave the humour to the Venezuelan president; he is more boffin than buffoon. He earned a Masters degree in Belgium, an economics doctorate in Illinois, US, and speaks Spanish, French, English and Quechua. Before being elected president, his only political experience was a few months as finance minister; otherwise, he was a university professor and consultant. This is the intelligent face of “21st century socialism”.


Correa’s first move as president was to declare the need for a blank slate, a new set of politicians to allow real change. Like Chávez, he introduced a new national constitution and then won a healthy majority in the resulting Assembly.

However, while Chávez now launches wave after wave of nationalisation, Correa has steered a moderate economic course. He has cracked down on big companies, Occidental Petroleum and the phone network Porta, for environmental offences and tax evasion respectively. “The party’s over,” he told Porta. “If you don’t like it, we’ll use another company.” The moves were “a boost to national self-esteem”, according to Paulina Recalde, an analyst.

The president then announced Ecuador would default on $3.4bn of its national debt, claiming it had been contracted “illegally and illegitimately” by past governments. Last week he said Ecuador would in fact repay it, but at a 70 per cent discount. Nonetheless, the government claims that for the first time Ecuador is spending more on social services than debt repayments. Correa still lacks the money for Chávez-style missions, but his supporters attribute virtual miracles to the new social programmes.

“Before there were three social classes: upper, middle and lower. Now there are just the first two,” says René Vega, a retired soldier. That’s plainly not true, but the government has introduced free education and medical care.

More than 100,000 subsidised houses have been built. The minimum wage was increased by 15 per cent and benefit payments to the poor doubled from $15 to $30 a month (the Ecuadorian currency adopted the US dollar in 2000). “They call it 21st century socialism,” says Carol Murillo, deputy director of the government-run newspaper El Telegrafo. “It’s really normal capitalism with wider social programmes.”

In Ecuador’s hospitals, the problems go back years. “Under [former president] Lucio Gutiérrez, we’d ask for new equipment time after time. And they’d always say that it was on its way. But there was no budget: if a doctor died, no one was hired to replace them. At first we got angry, then we just resigned ourselves to it,” says Manuel Jimenez, a gynaecologist in the Amazon region.

A colleague adds: “They’d increase our salaries, but we didn’t have the tools to do our work.”

Little surprise then that the inauguration of new facilities at their hospital ends with cries of “Viva Correa!”. Had the equipment arrived a month earlier, one doctor observes, it would have saved several lives. Getting stuff done in Ecuador requires more than just political will. All too often it requires leadership right from the top, and Correa is a known micro-manager. It’s not always pretty – ministers reportedly leave his office in tears, while the press is moved out of hearing range of his tirades – but it is done with an unusual competence.

Even a World Bank official, whose boss has been kicked out of the country by Correa, has praise for the president. “The IMF’s been recommending for 20 years that there should be a single treasury account [to help planning]. Which president goes and does it? Correa.” That’s probably an endorsement a nationalist leader could do without.

Correa has also communicated better than any previous president what he’s doing and why. On Saturday mornings he hosts a lengthy radio
show and he’s prone to dashing around the country in one of the Ecuadorian army’s very few helicopters. Nearly 40 per cent of Ecuador’s population live in poverty, and income distribution remains appallingly unequal. Correa has a lot of work to do. And there are doubts about how he’s doing it.

The one social group solidly against him is the upper-middle class, particularly in the economic powerhouse of Guayaquil. They object not only to taxes on the rich to pay for social services, but also to the centralisation of power by the president.

The old political elite may have been rotten, but can one arrogant man replace it? Nor is everyone on the left happy. One of Correa’s initial allies, Alberto Acosta, left the government over its insistence on promoting mining in some of the country’s most biodiverse areas.

“Some members of the government think that, with a higher oil price, the economic problems will go away. They won’t,” he says. “We have to go beyond a model of just extracting resources.”

Correa sometimes seems more interested in punishing US companies than in ensuring environmental damage doesn’t recur. Communities have lost the right to block extraction of oil and other resources, as the government looks hungrily for revenues for its social spending.

Now the head of Ecuador’s leading environmental NGO, Ivonne Ramos, predicts “high levels of social conflict” as the government tries to push through mining projects. Mining captures Correa’s complicated relationship with the country’s indigenous population.

On the one hand, he has shown respect for indigenous symbolism. On the other, he has sought to discredit the indigenous leaders – satirised as golden ponchos – for tolerating the neo-liberal reforms of previous governments.

Meanwhile, as higher food prices pinch, there is some nostalgia for past presidents. In the cities, unemployment is rising. Hundreds of workers head out onto the pavements at dawn, hoping that someone will pick them up for a day’s labour. “It must be the president’s fault,” says one, an out-of-luck plumber.

So will it all end in disillusion? “That’s happened before because of Ecuador’s structural condition as a place of instability and inequality,” says pollster Pérez. There’s little doubt that Ecuadorians make a demanding electorate.

One watch-repairer – a member of Correa’s party – told me in all seriousness that the president could count on his vote only if he personally listened to a complaint about a motoring fine and came to a performance of his music group.

For the moment, however, no Ecuadorian president has been as ambitious or as popular as Correa. Revolution or not, it is his to throw away.