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Ecuador presidential hopeful vows oil shakeup
AFP
MADRID
Petroleumworld.com 10 15 06
Rafael Correa, the populist campaigner thought likely to win Ecuador's presidential elections on Sunday, vowed in interviews published Saturday that if victorious he will tear up contracts with foreign oil companies.
Like Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, the former college professor and economy minister has made it clear that Ecuador must assert control over its own resources.
In interviews with the Spanish dailies ABC and El Pais, he described multinational oil companies as "abusive" and said the country was being mugged as a result of its contracts with them.
"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."
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 here juridical security has been interpreted as submitting to the whims of foreign investors, and that we are not going to accept under any circumstances."
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.
Speaking of Ecuadorian emigres, some 90,000 of whom legally reside in Spain, Correa commented that they had left not of their own free will but had, in effect, been exiled "because their country has denied them a future, a job, education and health care.
"We have to change a harmful system that has caused more than three million Ecuadorians to leave. Our objective is to have not an opulent country but one in which people can find work and dignity in their own land."
AFP 14 1158 GMT 10 06
Copyright ©2006 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
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