Cuban President Fidel Castro on the balcony at the government palace in Quito, Thursday, Nov. 28, 2002. Castro arrived in Quito Thursday to attend the inauguration ceremony for an art museum by the late Ecuadorean artist Oswaldo Guayasamin. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)**** Fidel Castro - Cuba
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez greets supporters upon arrival at his hotel in Quito, November 29, 2002. Chavez and Cuban President Fidel Castro (news - web sites) are in Ecuador to attend the inauguration ceremony for Ecuadorean artist's Oswaldo Guayasamin work 'La Capilla del hombre' (The Chapel of Man), in Quito November 29. REUTERS/Mariana Bazo **** Hugo Chavez - Venezuela
November 24, 2002 - Latin America's left revisits prominence***QUITO, Ecuador -- A former army colonel who once toppled a president stands poised to win the presidency of Ecuador today, continuing a left-leaning populist wave sweeping South America, where democratic government and free-market economics have failed millions of people.
With support from the country's powerful indigenous rights movement, poor urban neighborhoods and leftist political circles, Lucio Gutierrez, 45, led his opponent, Ecuador's richest man, by as much as 30 points in some polls. But the race appeared to be tightening in its final days, and some analysts cautioned that Gutierrez's apparent romp could stumble at the ballot box.
Win or lose today, Gutierrez's strong showing is interpreted by many here as an expression of voters' rejection of both traditional politics and the free-market model, called globalization, pushed by Washington and Wall Street.
"It's an economic model that has not given anyone very much," said Antonio Posso, vice president of Ecuador's badly fragmented Congress, which was elected in the Oct. 20 voting that put Gutierrez and banana baron Alvaro Noboa, 52, in today's runoff.
The latest hop to the left in the region began with the 1998 election of now-embattled Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose still unrealized revolution promised to favor the oil-rich nation's poor majority and sweep aside traditional power brokers.
In 2000, socialist Ricardo Lagos won the presidency of Chile and presides over a coalition government. In August, an Indian leader who opposes globalization nearly won the presidency of Bolivia and remains a powerful political force there.
Last month, socialist union leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won the presidency of Brazil by a huge margin, and leftist and anti-establishment parties dominated regional elections in Peru last Sunday.
Still, today's leftist tide seems a pale reflection of the past, when Cuba's Fidel Castro, Nicaragua's Sandinistas and other armed revolutionaries fought to transform the region's society and politics by force.
Though similar forces in their own societies have propelled each of the leaders to power, their platforms have not been coordinated on a regional level. Lula, Gutierrez and others have held the volatile Chavez at arm's length.***
