Ex-colonel takes charge in Ecuador with pledge to poor

Two years after he was jailed for organising a coup, a former army colonel offering extravagant promises of help to the poor has been elected president of Ecuador. Lucio Gutierrez is the latest in a series of left-wing populists to take power in Latin America.

According to final results released yesterday, Mr Gutierrez won 54.3 per cent of the vote, handsomely ahead of his rival, a billionaire banana and shipping magnate called Alvaro Noboa, who won 45.7 per cent. Sunday's vote was a run-off after a first round of elections on 20 October.

Neither candidate has ever occupied elected office, and the campaign was as long on rhetoric as it was short on substance. Both men exceeded permitted campaign spending limits in an attempt to denigrate each other's characters, with accusations of wife- beating and child exploitation flying in either direction.

In the end, however, it was Mr Gutierrez who more convincingly portrayed himself as an outsider free of the endemic corruption of Ecuadorean politics. He promised to cut the number of members of parliament and change the rules for high-level appointments in politics and the judiciary to make Ecuador more truly democratic. He also promised cheap housing and health care for the poor – both desperately needed in a country where 60 per cent of the population lives in poverty – but did not say how he would find the money for them given Ecuador's obligations to a stringent International Monetary Fund to manage its foreign debt.

With his swarthy looks, indicating some residue of Indian ancestry, and his humble origins, Mr Gutierrez came across as a more plausible man of the people than Mr Noboa, who could not escape the image of a big business fat cat with support largely in the urban coastal region of the country.

There are concerns, however, that his political base is too narrow for him to be able to challenge the establishment as much as he would like – he and his rag-tag coalition of populist parties control just 15 per cent of the seats in parliament. And he also has to convince the world, starting with the United States, that he is not going to follow the example of Hugo Chavez, another left-wing populist who has bitterly divided Venezuela in his five years in power and become a major irritant to Washington.

During the first round of the campaign, Mr Gutierrez scared some foreign investors because he talked about abandoning the US dollar as Ecuador's currency and relinquishing US rights to use the Manta air base in its war on drugs.

For the run-off, however, Mr Gutierrez abandoned his military fatigues for a normal business suit, made a trip to Wall Street to reassure investors and backed off on the currency and the air base issue.

"I am not a communist. I am a profoundly Christian man who respects private property and human rights," he said. "I want to give the greatest of assurances to the national productive sector, the national financial sector and the international financial sector."

Much like the Brazilian president-elect, Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, another left-wing populist, he appears to have appeased the Americans, at least for the moment. A US State Department spokeswoman congratulated Ecuador "on the completion of what appears to be a free, fair and transparent election ... We are pleased to see democracy working in Ecuador".