Ecuador's president vows to focus on poor

QUITO, Ecuador -- Rafael Correa vowed to put Ecuador's poor ahead of foreign debt payments as he was sworn in as president yesterday, at an inauguration attended by members of the growing club of leftist Latin American leaders.

Correa raised a sword given to him by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez during the ceremony, which also drew two other prominent US antagonists, Bolivian President Evo Morales and Iran's hard-line leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and more moderate left-leaning leaders from Brazil, Chile, and Peru also attended the inauguration.

Correa, 43, a charismatic political outsider who won a November runoff election, said he would work for an "economic revolution" in Ecuador that would emphasize the renegotiating of foreign debt, "paying only what we can after attending to the needs of the poor."

Correa, who has a doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois, said the free-market policies promoted by Washington since the 1980s have failed to help Ecuador develop. He said some of the loans arranged by previous governments had been lost to corruption, and an international tribunal should be set up to decide what debt should be repaid.

During the campaign last fall, Correa threatened to cut ties with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and said he would not rule out a moratorium on foreign debt payments unless foreign bondholders agree to lower Ecuador's debt service by half.

He said in September that Ecuador cannot afford its current $2 billion debt service, representing 7 percent of the country's gross domestic product. "Ecuador cannot pay more than 3 percent," he said at the time.

He did not mention the possibility of a debt moratorium in his speech yesterday. "If he goes ahead with it, I don't think it's going to help Ecuador's economy," said Michael Shifter, a Latin America analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue research group in Washington.

Keeping a campaign promise, Correa also issued a decree yesterday calling for Ecuadorans to vote March 18 in a national referendum on the need for a special assembly to rewrite the constitution. He has said the measure is necessary to limit the power of Ecuador's traditional parties, which he blames for the country's problems.

His plans for a constitutional assembly could put him on a collision course with Congress, which is dominated by Ecuador's traditional parties. Lawmakers have dismissed the last three elected presidents after huge street protests demanding their ousters.

Strapping on the red, yellow, and blue presidential sash and smiling broadly as he waved to cheering supporters in the galleries of Congress, Correa complained yesterday that Ecuador has "a perverse system that has destroyed our democracy, our economy and our society."

Accepting Chavez's gift of a replica of liberation hero Simon Bolivar's sword, Correa said the gathered leaders share a new responsibility: "The people won't forgive us if we don't advance the integration of our America," he said.

Correa becomes the eighth president in the last decade in a nation marked by chronic political instability since it returned to democracy in 1979.

He said a new constitution is vital to limiting the power of the traditional parties, which he accuses of defending their own interests rather than the interests of the people.

Alluding to Martin Luther King Jr., he said, "My dream . . . is to see a country without extreme poverty, without children begging in the streets, a nation without opulence but dignified and happy."