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Ecuadorans choose new president in tight race
By Santiago Piedra
AFP
QUITO
Petroleumworld.com 10 16 06
Millions of Ecuadorans went to the polls Sunday in a tight presidential race pitting a leftist critic of Washington against a conservative billionaire who considers himself chosen by God.
Opinion polls showed Rafael Correa, a 43-year-old economist and an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, was virtually tied with banana magnate Alvaro Noboa, 56, the country's richest man.
According to the survey firm Market, Correa polled 28.4 percent against 27 percent for Noboa, well within the survey's margin of error.
Balloting began at 1200 GMT and polls close at 2200 GMT.
Rafael Bielsa, head of an Organization of American States observation team, said the voting was going ahead normally throughout Ecuador and that despite small problems there was "no irregularity" in the polling.
"No doubt there are problems typical in any electoral process in a perfectly peaceful environment," he said. "We have no reports of violence."
Bielsa, a former foreign minister from Argentina, has been slammed as biased by the leftist candidate, but Saturday he said charges of fraud were unproven.
Current President Alfredo Palacio said Sunday that the election results "will be respected."
"Citizens can be certain that today they can go to the polls with a total guarantee that their decision will be respected," he said at a ceremony marking the start of voting.
"Political reform in this country is continuing to take shape and the call for it has been heard around the country," he said.
Neither Correa nor Noboa is expected to win the mandatory 40 percent of votes for an outright victory, so they will likely meet again 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 campaign rallies, Noboa has sounded more like a revivalist preacher than a presidential candidate. He has asked voters to pray to Christ Jesus for the handicapped. At each public appearance, he has handed out a 500-dollar check and a wheelchair.
At one 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."
The Roman Catholic Church in Ecuador has condemned Noboa's use of Bibles, crucifixes and rosaries in his campaign.
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 into middle-class citizens."
Correa said if he wins Sunday, or in the runoff, he would seek full integration for Ecuador into Mercosur, the South 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 (economic) 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."
In mandatory voting, Ecuadorans will also elect members of Congress as well as provincial and municipal officials.
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.
Two earthquakes rattled Quito during Sunday's balloting, said seismologists with Ecuador's Geophysical Institute. The first, at 10:30 am (1530 GMT), registered 4.1 on the Richter scale, and a weaker aftershock struck at 10:44 am (1544 GMT). Neither quake was believed to have caused injury or damage.
AFP 15 2047 GMT 10 06
Copyright ©2006 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
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