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A leftist economist who called for Ecuador to cut ties with international lenders appeared to have easily won the presidency of this poor, politically unstable Andean nation, strengthening South America's tilt to the left.

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So, pro-American candidates have lost in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. Venezuela remains in opposition, too.

In Mexico, no one knows the actual outcome, though the pro-American candidate has a less-than-1% margin of victory according to the official tally.

Okay, well, not quite. But basically!

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Boosted by a referendum on Sunday that overwhelmingly backed his reform agenda, Rafael Correa, Ecuador's leftwing president, has accused the World Bank of extortion and threatened to kick out the multilateral lender.

The remarks suggest Mr Correa views the referendum victory as an important battle with his domestic political opponents and has now shifted his focus to his antagonists in the international arena.

The president said he would be asking the Bank's representative in Ecuador why the lender refused to disburse a $100m loan in 2005, when Mr Correa was finance minister. "If he doesn't give explications that we consider satisfactory, we will expel the World Bank representative because we won't accept any blackmail from anyone," he said.

The president's complaint is personal: as finance minister, he visited Washington in August 2005 to collect a $100m loan as part of the Bank's fiscal support programme for Ecuador. However, Mr Correa was left embarrassingly empty-handed: the Bank suspended the loan in response to Ecuador's restructuring of an oil stabilisation fund.

In an interview with the Financial Times at the time, Mr Correa said that by denying the loan at the last moment, the World Bank had broken a contract with the Andean country.

"This is an offence for Ecuador. A loan had been approved and was in place and they are cancelling it, completely outside any ethical or legal principle, because we changed a law," he told the FT at the time. "We are a sovereign country. Nobody can punish us because we are changing our own laws."

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Originally posted by jeff house:
So, pro-American candidates ...

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Interestingly, one of Bush's great legacies is turning most of Latin America to the left through a great two-pronged effort: (1) getting so bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan that there are few resources to expend on repressing other areas, and (2) being so malevolent and idiotic (partly through 1) that most of the world, including in the Americas, wants to distance itself from the US.

The less stupid US presidents of the past would never have allowed this to happen.

So Bush is not only the great champion of the "terrorists", swelling their numbers and boosting them up to heights not dreamed of 8 years ago, but he has also been a huge boost to the left, both moderate and more radical.

I wonder who will be the first to honour Bush with a statue or something: the "terrorists" or the "left"?

[ 18 April 2007: Message edited by: Albireo ]