Anti-U.S. candidate gaining in Ecuador

QUITO, Ecuador — Ecuador's front-runner in Sunday's presidential election has rattled Wall Street with anti-U.S. rhetoric and nationalist pledges torn from the playbook of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

Rafael Correa's surge in the polls from a distant third a month ago to first place caused investors to dump Ecuadorean bonds last week amid fears the former economy minister would move the South American nation into a leftist alliance with Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia.

U.S. officials and Chávez — apparently wary of tilting the race with ill-advised comments — have been studiously silent about the rise of the 43-year-old Correa, who last month called President Bush a "tremendously dim-witted" president and vowed to oppose trade talks with Washington.

With 13 presidential candidates competing Sunday, a Nov. 26 runoff election is likely.

Forceful and dynamic, Correa has increasingly attracted undecided voters who see him as a fresh face in a field of old-time politicians. But the latest polls show his closest rival — billionaire banana magnate Alvaro Noboa — is gaining as well and now has about 23 percent support to Correa's 26 percent.

"There's no way of denying that a Correa victory in the second round would be a very significant assault against Washington's Latin American policy," said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington. "And it would certainly bring in a new recruit for the Chávez bloc at a time when that bloc very much needs one."

Correa's candidacy follows that of other Chávez allies, including President Evo Morales of Bolivia, elected last year on a platform of opposing U.S.-backed anti-drug efforts in the region, and Ollanta Humala, the nationalist who came close to winning Peru's presidency this year.

Ecuador snapshot


Turbulent politics: Three Ecuadorean presidents have been ousted in the past decade, reflecting disillusionment with its traditional political class.

No. 1 in bananas: Ecuador is the world's No. 1 banana exporter, but oil is the country's leading shipment overseas. It also exports coffee, cocoa, shrimp and fish. Soaring oil revenues are bolstering the economy.

The people: Most of the country's 13.3 million people live in the Andean highlands. More than half are mestizo and a quarter indigenous. Spanish is the official language, but many people speak Quechua and Jarvo languages. Six out of 10 people live in poverty.

Darwin's inspiration: Ecuador is home to the Galapagos islands, where hundreds of unique species inspired 19th century British naturalist Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.

Sources: Reuters and columbia.thefreedictionary.com

Chávez has been accused of meddling in elections this year in Peru, Mexico and Nicaragua, and "his backing can be the kiss of death to a candidate," Birns said.

That was the case with Peru's Humala, who won the most votes earlier this year in the first round but was handily defeated in the June runoff by center-left President Alan Garcia, who adroitly painted his rival as a radical Chávez pawn.

Correa, who has a doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois, opposes resuming stalled free-trade talks with the United States and says he would not extend a treaty scheduled to expire in 2009 that lets the U.S. military use the Manta air base for drug-surveillance flights.

He also wants to cut ties to international lending institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and he has threatened a moratorium on foreign-debt payments unless foreign bondholders agree to lower Ecuador's debt service by half.

Seven years ago, an economic crisis forced banks to close their doors and the country defaulted on its foreign debt. Ecuador later adopted the U.S. dollar as its official currency.

Maria Teresa Romero, a professor of international studies at the Central University of Venezuela, said Correa is "less dangerous" than Humala, a former army officer under criminal investigation for alleged human-rights abuses in Peru. "But just like him, he has radical ideas and would radically change the face of Ecuador," she said.

University of Illinois economics professor Werner Baer, who was on the panel that approved Correa's doctorate, told The Associated Press last month that his former pupil's anti-U.S. spiel was probably a ploy to get votes.

"I doubt that he would be virulently anti-American like Chávez," Baer said, predicting Correa would likely follow the more moderate lead of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.

Associated Press writers Joshua Goodman in Bogotá, Colombia, Elizabeth M. Nunez in Caracas, Venezuela, and Rick Vecchio in Lima, Peru, contributed to this report.