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Presidential favorite in Ecuador has wealthy in a sweat
AFP
QUITO
Petroleumworld.com 10 15 06
Ecuador's wealthy fear that leftist candidate Rafael Correa, the frontrunner in Sunday's presidential vote, will undermine foreign investment and possibly steer the country to communism.
Correa, a 43 year-old economist and ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, has alleged that vote fraud will deny him a victory that would allow him to avoid a November runoff against the expected second-place finisher, banana magnate Alvaro Noboa, 56.
Ecuador's elite, which largely dominate the country's politics, fear his close ties with Chavez and have charged that Venezuela is helping finance his campaign. Both Correa and Venezuelan officials have denied the accusation.
Correa "is going to lead us to a confrontation between Ecuadorans, because in the event -- not a given -- that he can get elected, we see that he is going to look for confrontation," warned Mauricio Pinto, who leads the influential business association including Quito firms.
In interviews with the Spanish dailies ABC and El Pais, Correa described multinational oil companies as "abusive" and said his country was being robbed.
"According to the constitution, petroleum is the property of the state, but for every five barrels they extract they take away four and leave us with one," he said. "This is absolutely unacceptable."
If his Alianza Pais party is elected, "we are going to renegotiate all the petroleum contracts," Correa told ABC, "but we are also going to make sure that the companies comply with them, something that does not happen at present. They do not respect their investment programs, their impact on the environment or the use of technology friendly to the environment."
Ecuador, a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) until 1992, relies heavily on oil and banana exports as its key exports.
Asked if he was not afraid that Ecuador would end up on a list of countries where it is considered unsafe to invest, Correa replied: "Here nobody is against security of contracts, on the contrary. We are in favor, but watch it -- because legal security has been interpreted as submitting to the whims of foreign investors, and that we are not going to accept under any circumstances."
Correa has 31 percent voter support according to a Saturday poll by the firm Cedatos-Gallup.
He will most likely face Noboa, the richest man in Ecuador, in a second round of balloting. Noboa, in his third try for the presidency, measured 25 percent support in the Cedatos-Gallup poll, followed by moderate socialist Leon Roldos with 19 percent.
An openly pro-US candidate, Noboa is campaigning as a bible-thumping populist and a rabid anti-communist.
In his final campaign rally Friday in the port city of Guayaquil -- Ecuador biggest city, on the Pacific coast -- Noboa sounded more like a revivalist preacher than a presidential candidate.
On a stage standing next to four handicapped people, he called on "everyone present and all of Ecuador to join me in praying the Our Father, so that Christ Jesus intercedes for the health of these four Ecuadorans."
At an earlier campaign rally Noboa gave three reasons why he should be president: "Because I am one of the poor and I am the candidate of the poor. Because God has told me to be president."
Noboa, who has blasted Correa as a "communist devil," has promised 300,000 new homes to the country's poor, and at each campaign rally has given a 500 dollar check and a wheelchair to an impoverished crippled person.
Correa said if he wins Sunday, or in a second round on November 26, he would seek full integration for Ecuador into Mercosur, the Latin American single market, and would not sign any trade deals with Washington.
A former economy minister, Correa describes himself as a "Christian, humanist and leftist."
"We have to overcome the fallacies of neoliberalism and search for what in Latin America has been called 21st century socialism," he told foreign media here.
"Neoliberalism has been a disaster in the world, and particularly in Latin America and in Ecuador," he said. "We need to move toward another model that recovers the state's fundamental role in the economy."
Billionaire Noboa cast the election as "a battle of ideologies, between the statist, communist and leftist ones of Correa, and free markets, which I represent."
vel/mdl/ch/ddl
AFP 14 2257 GMT 10 06
Copyright ©2006 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
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