León Febres Cordero
León Febres Cordero was president of Ecuador from 1984 to 1988, the Guayaquil industrialist and Social Christian who won the run-off of May 1984 by three points on the slogan bread, roof and jobs. He governed as the Reagan of the Andes, the first of the region's free-market presidents of the debt crisis. The exchange rate was freed, the tariffs cut, the price controls lifted, the foreign investment invited, the debt rescheduled on the banks' terms and the American alignment complete. Reagan received him in Washington in January 1986 as the model. The four years were also the war on the Alfaro Vive guerrillas fought by a police unit that tortured and disappeared, for which a truth commission in 2010 found the state responsible for sixty-eight per cent of the abuses of the period. There were the air force commander General Vargas's two risings of 1986 and 1987, the second of which had the president kidnapped at an air base at Taura for eleven hours by paratroopers demanding Vargas's amnesty, which he gave. There was the earthquake of March 1987 that broke the oil pipeline and stopped the exports for six months. After that the congress declared him unfit and he ignored it. He was born in Guayaquil in 1931 into the port's aristocracy, studied mechanical engineering at the Stevens Institute in New Jersey, ran the Noboa group's companies and the chambers of industry. He was a senator in the 1960s and a deputy from 1979. He led the congressional opposition to Roldós and Hurtado with a temper that the country called his, before the presidency and after it. He was mayor of Guayaquil from 1992 to 2000, the office he is remembered for on the coast, in which he rebuilt the city's waterfront, its streets and its finances with a hand that the city's poor called the Malecón and the city's critics called the caudillo's, and which his successor Nebot continued for nineteen years. He ran the Social Christian Party from the sidelines through the governments of the 1990s and 2000s, brought down at least two of them in the congress. He was the man Correa's revolution of 2007 was made against. He died in Guayaquil in December 2008 of emphysema at seventy-seven. The city buried him on the Malecón he had built, while the president did not attend.
- Lived: 1931 CE – 2008 CE
- Nationality: Ecuadorian
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
