TheEconomistFebruary 8th 2020 271I
t is ecuador’strial of the century. On
February 10th the country’s top court is
expected to open criminal proceedings
against Rafael Correa, president from 2007
to 2017, and 20 other people. They are
charged with taking and giving bribes,
which they deny. Mr Correa, who moved to
Belgium shortly after leaving office, hopes
to play a big role in the presidential and leg-
islative elections due in February next year.
His trial may determine whether he can.
Ecuador’s current president, Lenín Mo-
reno, has spent nearly three years trying to
undo Mr Correa’s legacy. He had been Mr
Correa’s vice-president and was seen as his
heir. Once in office, Mr Moreno turned on
his patron. He went after corrupt members
of Mr Correa’s administration and took
steps to restore independence to the judi-
ciary and the press, which Mr Correa had
curbed. The new president replaced his
predecessor’s incontinent spending with a
programme of austerity, backed with a
$4.2bn loan from the imf. He expelled Ju-
lian Assange, a co-founder of WikiLeaks,
from Ecuador’s embassy in London, where
Mr Correa had offered refuge.But the undoing project has run into
trouble. Mr Moreno’s attempt to end fuel
subsidies provoked massive protests in Oc-
tober, which forced him to retreat. His ap-
proval rating is less than 20%. Mr Moreno
says that he does not plan to run for re-elec-
tion next year, but he is determined to en-
sure that correísmodoes not come back. A
trial that discredits Mr Correa would help.
The investigations of Mr Correa and his
co-defendants began last May after two
journalists, Fernando Villavicencio and
Christian Zurita, revealed an alleged
scheme to funnel bribes paid by companies
into the campaign coffers of Alianza pais,
then Mr Correa’s (and now Mr Moreno’s)
political party. On the day after their first
story appeared police arrested Pamela Mar-
tínez, a former Constitutional Court judge
who had been an aide to Mr Correa, as she
tried to board a flight to Mexico. A search
turned up a deposit slip for a $6,000
cheque credited to Mr Correa’s account (he
says it was a personal loan). Ms Martínez
told a court that Mr Correa had asked her to
confirm that she had destroyed incrimi-
nating evidence.Also on trial is Jorge Glas, a Correa ally
who was Mr Moreno’s vice-president and is
in jail for arranging kickbacks from Ode-
brecht, a Brazilian construction firm that
bribed officials across Latin America. Offi-
cials from companies that allegedly paid
bribes, including skEngineering, a South
Korean builder, are in the dock. Several
projects during Mr Correa’s presidency
were badly built and busted their budgets.
The government spent $3.7bn, 3% of 2019’s
gdp, on two failed refineries.
Mr Correa, who will be tried in absentia,
claims that he is the victim of a witch-hunt.
He recently tweeted that his enemies are
“terrified of the response that the people
will give them at the polls”. Simón Pachano,
a political scientist at flacsoUniversity in
Quito, disagrees. “It’s a trial of politicians,
not a politicised trial,” he says.
That would not have happened if Mr
Moreno had not restored to the courts a
measure of the independence they lost un-
der Mr Correa. In 2018 Mr Moreno held a
referendum, which gave him a mandate to
set up an independent panel to review the
judiciary. That body replaced senior prose-
cutors and the judges on the Constitutional
Court, who were widely regarded as Mr
Correa’s puppets. It also purged the mem-
bers of the Judiciary Council, which Mr
Correa had used to sack judges he didn’t
like and intimidate others. Mr Moreno un-
muzzled the press by abolishing the
“Superintendancy of Information and
Communication”, an agency that Mr Correa
had used to control the media.EcuadorThe future of the undoing project
QUITO
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