Rafael Correa
Rafael Correa was president of Ecuador from 2007 to 2017, ten years in a country that had had seven presidents in the ten before, the economist with the Illinois doctorate who had been finance minister for four months in 2005 and resigned over the World Bank. He won the election of 2006 promising a citizens' revolution. There was the constituent assembly of 2008 that wrote the constitution giving rights to nature, the default on three billion dollars of bonds he called illegitimate and bought back at a third. There were the renegotiated oil contracts that gave the state most of the windfall of the boom, the roads, hospitals, schools and hydroelectric dams the windfall and Chinese loans built, and the poverty rate cut from thirty-seven per cent to twenty-three. There was the expulsion of the American base at Manta, the asylum given to Julian Assange in the London embassy in 2012. There was the war with the press, which he sued, fined and regulated under a communications law of 2013 and called his greatest enemy. He was born in Guayaquil in 1963 into a lower-middle-class family whose father had been jailed in the United States as a drug mule, studied economics at the Catholic University of Guayaquil, at Louvain and at Illinois, spent a year in a Kichwa village in Cotopaxi as a Salesian volunteer where he learned the language. He taught at the University of San Francisco in Quito. The police revolt of 30 September 2010 over their bonuses, in which he was tear-gassed, held in a hospital for ten hours and freed by the army in a gunfight, he called a coup attempt and the courts agreed. The oil price's fall in 2014 ended the money, the earthquake of April 2016 killed six hundred and seventy. He chose not to seek a fourth term, handing over in May 2017 to his vice-president Lenín Moreno, who turned against him within months, dismantled his apparatus and let the courts proceed. He was convicted in absentia in 2020 of bribery in the 2012-16 campaign financing and sentenced to eight years. He has lived since 2017 in Belgium, his wife's country, from which he runs the movement that still wins a third of the vote and has lost three presidential run-offs.
- Lived: 1963 CE – ?
- Nationality: Ecuadorian
- Roles: president, economist, politician
