Presidential Race In Ecuador Heads To Second Round

Candidate Rafael Correa calls himself a friend of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. (Dolores Ochoar -- Associated Press)

"I think he brings up God so often that he must have sensibilities in his soul," Teran said.

Correa, though, has appealed to Ecuadorans who are tired of a chaotic and corruption-riddled political system. Three presidents have been toppled since 1997, the last one, Lucio Gutiérrez, just last year after a bloc of Congress voted him out. Fistfights are not uncommon in Congress, nor is scandal.

And even though Ecuador is the continent's second-largest exporter of oil to the United States, after Venezuela, most of its people are poor and underemployed.

"He's not offering housing, a new health system or education -- he's offering renewal of the political system," said Adrian Bonilla, director of the Ecuador branch of the Latin American Faculty for Social Sciences, a continent-wide university system.

Bonilla argued that, despite Correa's super-heated oratory, he is far from being a knee-jerk radical who would upend Ecuador's economy. Instead, Bonilla said, Correa is influenced by Keynesian thought, which sees a central role for government in managing the economy, and by contemporary economists such as the American Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz, who argues that unchecked globalization harms poor countries.

Still, the rhetoric from Correa's campaign has often touched on the kinds of nationalistic themes espoused by Chávez and other populist leaders in Latin America. Two key advisers slated to be named ministers in a Correa government, Augusto Tandazo and Alberto Acosta, told foreign reporters that Ecuador would be tough on transnational companies and multilateral lenders.

"Ecuador is not against foreign investors," said Tandazo, considered a hard-liner on oil issues. "But we want foreign investment that knows how to control its voracious appetite."

Opponents of Correa have cast him as a puppet of Chávez, but Acosta said a Correa administration would follow its own path, neither tied to Chávez nor following the free-market direction of another leftist leader, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

"We are not copying Lula, Chávez or Kirchner," he said, referring to Argentina's president, Nestor Kirchner. "Rafael Correa is Rafael Correa, with all his positive attributes and drawbacks. We are not waiting for a prescription from abroad."

Still, many Ecuadorans have had it with promises and politics. Vladimir Peña, 33, an accountant, said he would like wholesale change but sees most of the candidates as opportunistic populists. He invalidated his ballot.

"We've had lots of populists here," he said. "And what happens is they last six months, and that's it."