Ecuador's Correa breezes to 2nd re-election

President Rafael Correa, a fiery-tongued leftist who has endeared himself to the lower classes by expanding Ecuador's welfare state but drawn wide rebuke for intolerance of dissent, breezed to a second re-election on Sunday.       

The U.S.-educated economist won 56.9 percent of the vote against 23.8 percent for his closest challenger, former banker Guillermo Lasso, with 57 percent of the vote counted.                                      
Correa, 48, called the outcome a victory for his "citizens' revolution," and promised to further reduce poverty, which the United Nations says has dropped nearly five percentage points to 32.4 percent since he first took office in 2007.                 

"We are only here to serve you. Nothing for us. Everything for you," Correa told jubilant supporters from the balcony of the Carondelet presidential palace, celebrating long before official results were released.               

Correa's result Sunday topped the 51.7 percent he won in his first re-election in April 2009 in a ballot set up by a voter-approved constitutional rewrite. Correa is now legally barred from another 4-year term.                

Correa dedicated his victory to Venezuela's cancer-stricken President Hugo Chavez, his close ally among Latin America's alliance of leftist leaders.                         

Ecuador relies on petroleum for more than half of its export earnings, and he has used this oil wealth to make public education and health care more accessible, and lay thousands of kilometers (miles) of new highways.                

Correa said he's happy to have more foreign investment but "it's better not to have it than to mortgage the country in the name of that pipe dream called foreign investment."               

He did not explain, meanwhile, how he planned to pay for efforts to "quicken and deepen" poverty reduction. Skeptical economists say the state can't afford it without major new revenue sources.       


AP