QUITO: Ecuadorean leftist President Rafael Correa declared a re-election victory on Sunday in the first-round of the country’s presidential vote that would allow him to strengthen state control over the OPEC nation’s economy and gives a timely boost to Latin America’s alliance of socialist leaders.
According to an exit poll by private firm Opinion Publica, the 49-year-old Correa clinched 61 percent of the vote, while his rival former banker Guillermo Lasso secured 21 percent of the vote, the strongest showing of the seven opposition candidates in the race.
A separate exit poll by the firm Cedatos showed Correa winning 59 percent of the vote versus 20 percent for Lasso.
“Nobody is going to stop this revolution; we are making history,” said a jubilant Correa from the balcony of the presidential palace as he celebrated with thousands of supporters in the South American country’s capital.
“The colonial powers are not in charge anymore, you can be sure that in this revolution it’s Ecuadoreans who are in charge,” he told the crowd.
Correa is the first Ecuadorian president to complete his mandate in over sixteen years. The Andean country of 15 million people saw seven different presidents between 1996 and 2006. A US-trained economist, Correa was confirmed as president in 2009, in elections spurred by a new constitution.
Western Media calls him Left-wing Activist. He bycotted the Organization of American States summit in a show of solidarity with Cuba andcalled summit as ”imperialist interests”.
Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado was on born 6 April 1963) and he holds a Ph.D. degree in Economy. Rafael Correa comes from a working-class family who used to live in Guayaquil. In his doctoral dissertation, titled “Three Essays on Contemporaneous Latin American Development”, Correa affirmed essentially that the structural reforms instituted in Latin America beginning in the 1980s, failed as driver for growth in the region. By means of econometric analysis, Correa argued that the reforms did not spur growth and also that the liberalization of the labor markets reduced the productivity of Latin American countries.
An economist educated in Ecuador, Belgium and the United States, he was elected President in late 2006 and took office in January 2007. In December 2008, he declared Ecuador’s national debt illegitimate, based on the argument that it was odious debt contracted by corrupt and despotic prior regimes. He announced that the country would default on over $3 billion worth of bonds; he then pledged to fight creditors in international courts and succeeded in reducing the price of outstanding bonds by more than 60%. He brought Ecuador into the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas in June 2009
DND
