Ecuador under President Moreno: Rethinking the U.S. relationship with Latin America’s left

Ecuador under President Moreno: Rethinking the U.S. relationship with Latin America’s left
By Evan Ellis / May 26, 2017
DEMOCRACY & ELECTIONS

The inauguration of Lenin Moreno as Ecuador’s new President on May 24th creates an opportunity for the United States to reconstruct its relationship with Latin America’s left. It’s a new relationship that the U.S. should pursue with a combination of respect and great caution.

Let there be no mistake. Under Moreno’s predecessor Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s government pursued a policy that sometimes deliberately, and other times indirectly, undermined the strategic interests of the United States. The expulsion of the U.S. military from its forward operating location at Manta, Ecuador in September 2009 reduced the effectiveness of efforts to address narcotics trafficking in the region…

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…The victory of Lenin Moreno, the candidate of Rafael Correa’s Alianza País movement, over Guillermo Lasso of the Creando Opportunidades (CREO) party in the April 2017 presidential election, is generally interpreted as politically empowering the continuation of Correa’s leftist agenda. Yet Moreno is neither a continuation nor a moderation of the leftist policies of Correa, but rather, his own man. Among his first actions upon taking office, Moreno signed a series of degrees reorganizing the executive branch, eliminating the (arguably superfluous) Ministry for a Good Quality of Life (Secretaría de Buen Vivir), and a series of coordinating ministries, and also ending his predecessor’s family planning organization Plan Familia, which had been criticized by the left as too representative of traditional Catholic values. Read Article