Lenin Moreno, left, was inaugurated as the new President of Ecuador in the Plenum of the National Assembly, former President Rafael Correa, right welcomes him, in Quito, Wednesday, May 24, 2017. Photo by Gabriela Mena/ACG/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.
When I think about Rafael Correa, and I suppose that in Ecuador we all do more often than is good for us, the image that comes to mind is that of a bull. A bull: strong, fierce and tireless, capable of a great deal of work. The problem of course is that bulls can also be dangerous and destructive; get too close to a big animal in a small space and you’re likely to get hurt.
Ecuador is a small space, and a lot of people have been hurt over the last ten years by Correa’s bull headed attitude to getting things done. To be fair, he did get a lot of things done. For the outside observer it’s obvious that the country has changed, and not only on the infrastructure level. Correa gave Ecuadorians political stability after a tumultuous period of seven Presidents in ten years, and a sense of pride that they had never witnessed before, with the possible exception of a military victory over Peru in the border war of 1995. And after the economic disaster of the early century, when poverty levels briefly rose above fifty percent (50%) and it seemed that half the population was migrating, or at the very least considering it, this was nothing short of astounding. He put them on the map.
