
Ecuador on the Edge: A Tale of Two Presidential Candidates
The question of who wins the election race in Ecuador on November 26 may be overshadowed by the uncertainty over whether the winner will actually survive a full term. The politically unstable South American nation has had nine presidents over the last ten years. The current front-runner is Alvaro Noboa, a billionaire banana tycoon who has run unsuccessfully twice in the past. He won 27 percent of the vote in the first-round, edging out Rafael Correa (and 11 other candidates), a U.S trained economist who ran on a platform that attacked Washington's neoliberal policies, as well as the traditional corruption plaguing Ecuador's political system.