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Leftist, religious billionaire tied for lead in Ecuador presidential vote
By Santiago Piedra
AFP
QUITO
Petroleumworld.com 10 15 06
A leftist candidate harshly critical of Washington and a conservative billionaire who considers himself chosen by God were running neck-in-neck in opinion polls as Ecuadorans prepared to elect a new president Sunday.
Rafael Correa, a 43 year-old economist and an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, was virtually tied in a survey released late Saturday with banana magnate Alvaro Noboa, 56, Ecuador's richest person.
According to the survey firm Market, Correa polled 28.4 percent against 27 percent for Noboa, well within the survey's plus-or-minus four point margin of error.
On Saturday, Correa, who has maintained a strong lead in opinion polls for weeks in a crowded field of candidates, claimed that fraud was afoot and called for the removal of Rafael Bielsa, the head of the Organization of American States observation team, on charges of being biased.
Bielsa, an Argentine ex-foreign minister, said he would stay in Ecuador and insisted that none of the charges of plans for a fraud had been proven.
Since neither Correa nor Noboa are expected to win the mandatory 40 percent of votes for an outright victory, both are likely to face off in a November 26 runoff vote.
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 promised "to turn six million unemployed Ecuadorans in middle-class citizens." At each of his campaign rallies he has personally given a 500 dollar check and a wheelchair to an impoverished crippled person.
The Catholic Church in Ecuador has condemned Noboa's use of bibles, crucifixes and rosaries in his campaign.
Correa said if he wins Sunday, or in the runoff vote, 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, on his third presidential bid, cast the election as "a battle of ideologies, between the statist, communist and leftist ones of Correa, and free markets, which I represent."
Ecuadoran voters will also elect members of congress as well as provincial and municipal officials.
Voting is mandatory in Ecuador.
Ecuador has had seven presidents in the past 10 years, three of them leaving amid tumultuous uprisings.
Since 1979, only three democratically elected heads of state managed to serve out their full terms.
AFP 15 0252 GMT 10 06
Copyright ©2006 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
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