Ecuador’s former leader Rafael Correa evoked the spirit of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez on Monday as he vowed to fight for his political survival after being barred from returning to the presidency by his own people.
Mr Correa, who has dominated Ecuadorean politics for the past decade, had been expected to seek re-election in 2021. But in a referendum on Sunday his compatriots voted to change the constitution so that no elected official could stand for more than two terms.
In a tweet hours later, Mr Correa recalled that in 1992, after staging an unsuccessful military coup in Venezuela, the leftist Chavez admitted he had failed “for now”. “The rest is history,” Mr Correa said. “Twenty-six years later we say the same thing, and the rest will also be history.”