2 Ecuador Candidates Not Shy About Name-Calling

In a nation known for the extravagant use of theatrics, slander and sexual innuendo in political campaigns, the presidential race that ends with today’s election has set new standards of outrageous behavior and bizarre accusations from the stump.

In one of his milder attacks, candidate Abdala Bucaram called his opponent “an alcoholic, drug addict and vulgar servant of European culture.”

Bucaram’s solemn, usually diffident opponent, Rodrigo Borja, responded: “Bucaram is a true swine who wants to transform democracy into a sewer. I’m not Gandhi. . . . I have a right to defend myself. Bucaram uses the language of the brothel.”

That exchange suggests the tone of the runoff vote that will decide who will be Ecuador’s leader for the next four years. Both candidates are left of center, with few major policy differences. Rather, voters are choosing between 36-year-old Bucaram’s populist dramatics and quick-fix promises to the poor, and Borja’s more conventional social democratic ideology to grapple with the nation’s profound economic miseries.

Polls give Borja a slight edge, but Bucaram’s aggressive tactics have consistently won him more support than anticipated by the experts.

Ecuador, an Andean nation of 10 million people, was the first of seven South American nations that shunted military rulers aside in favor of civilian-led democratic administrations in the last decade.

Political commentators here now worry whether Ecuador’s third election since 1979 foreshadows a new voter affection for simplistic populism at a time when foreign debts, inflation and budget deficits seem hopelessly intractable throughout the region.

Career Politician

Borja, a 52-year-old career politician and law professor with little charisma, has built a formidable national political structure in a country of 16 weak parties that have always relied more on personality than policy. Borja’s Democratic Left party holds 29 of 71 legislative seats, and alliances with other center-left parties would give him an absolute majority in the unicameral Congress.

Cooperation and harmony between the president and the legislature would be in sharp contrast to the last four years, in which right-wing President Leon Febres Cordero, a staunch ally of President Reagan, has fought constantly with the opposition-controlled Congress.

Febres Cordero’s party suffered a drubbing Jan. 31 in the first-round presidential ballot among 10 candidates. His candidate, Sixto Duran, finished third behind Borja and Bucaram. Febres Cordero’s defeat was as much a rejection of his high-handed, arrogant style--he repeatedly refused to accept legislative orders--as a rejection of his free-market, pro-U.S. policies.

Febres Cordero also was unlucky. His four-year term saw oil prices collapse, slicing in half the oil income that has brought a measure of prosperity to one of the continent’s poorest countries.

Quake Wrecked Pipeline

Then, a severe earthquake struck in March, 1987, wrecking 30 miles of vital oil pipeline and halting exports for nearly six months. Ecuador had already frozen interest payments on its foreign debt, now $9.4 billion, and after the earthquake the government stopped all debt payments. Negotiations with foreign creditors are at a standstill.

The public budget deficit is more than 10% of the gross domestic product, and inflation has risen to about 60% a year. The plummeting sucre, Ecuador’s currency, forced Febres Cordero in February to abandon the floating exchange rate that formed the core of his free-market strategy.

Debating solutions to these problems logically should have been the heart of the campaign. Not so. Bucaram, needing to excite the voters, launched vituperative personal attacks on Borja and made a series of promises, without suggesting where the money would come from: a doubled minimum wage, free school lunches for every child, free national health care.

Borja at first ignored the personal attacks and focused on dry issues: incentives to business, renegotiation of the foreign debt, better health care. But soon he began responding to Bucaram, calling him a “madman” and “barbarian.”

The national magazine Vistazo commented: “If in ancient Rome the peoples’ happiness came from bread and circuses, today’s strategists in Ecuador have forgotten the bread and magnified the circus.”

‘A Tepid Man’

In an interview with the Mexican newspaper, El Pais, Bucaram said Borja “doesn’t awaken passion, hate, happiness or sadness. He is a tepid man. . . .”

In the same interview, Bucaram said he admires Adolf Hitler because “in the matter of political organization, he was one of the greatest geniuses in the history of the world.” But Bucaram condemned Hitler as a “degenerate” and “bloodthirsty” leader “who thank God, is no longer with us.”

Bucaram’s own organizing tactics in his home town of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city and principal port, also are formidable. To some, they are ultimately more frightening than his language.

Borja accuses Bucaram of pervasive corruption, including the formation of paramilitary squads in Guayaquil when he was mayor there to extort money from small businesses for projects. Some of the projects apparently included sanitation and other normal municipal services.

Still, Bucaram’s shrieking campaign speeches evoke substantial support among the poor in Guayaquil. His party, the Ecuadorean Roldosista Party, invokes the memory of populist President Jaime Roldos, who was killed in a plane crash in 1981, two years after taking office.

Desperate Problems

“Latin America is asphyxiating under the foreign debt and other economic problems,” said Benjamin Ortiz, editor of the Quito newspaper Hoy. “The people see that the traditional left hasn’t solved it, nor has the right, so in desperation they wonder if the crazies can do any better.

“The formal structure of the society is with Borja,” Ortiz says. “Those who are against the system are with Abdala.”

A foreigner who lives in Quito said some businessmen fear that Borja, who has a clear social democratic ideology, might nationalize some industries or otherwise make their life more difficult, while they believe they can manipulate Bucaram.

Borja said in his final campaign speech that “the choice is between sense and madness. . . . Everything he (Bucaram) touches turns to mud or blood.”

Bucaram mounted an extraordinary television advertising campaign with the slogan, “The power of the poor.”

One ad superimposed the devil’s form on Borja’s head, saying the race was between “a Christian and an atheist.” The Roman Catholic Church later declared that Borja is indeed a Catholic.

Arrested on Drug Charge

In another commercial, Bucaram acts out the role of a political prisoner rattling the bars of his cell. He was arrested once, on suspicion of possessing drugs, during a two-year exile in Panama. A Borja ad noted that Bucaram had said that he was well treated during his brief stint in the Panamanian jail and that Panama was paradise.

Bucaram has said in interviews that his antics and shouting on the podium are a calculated performance, and even his foes regard him as a shrewd operator. He is said to have impressed some businessmen in private meetings, where he makes a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation to a reasoned, low-key, thoughtful style. He rejects notions that the military, which openly dislikes him, would topple him if he were elected.

In any case, Ecuador has had a history of such performers through its 17 constitutions, dozens of coups and subsequent restorations of democratic government.

Populist Carlos Julio Arosemena, who became president in 1961, was deposed by the military two years later, officially on charges of drunkenness. Among other things, he had embarrassed the military by his drunken behavior at a banquet with the American ambassador.

Arosemena called his critics “Creole Calvinists who have a brilliant future behind them,” and bragged that he did his job “despite masculine passions and vices.”