Lenín Moreno, an unexpected transition government?

Little could the current president of Ecuador, Lenín Moreno, have imagined in 2017 that after a decade of government by Rafael Correa, a period of the greatest institutional stability in the country but of social and political tension, his administration as leader would be marked by a succession of crises. 

The fight against corruption and drug trafficking, the end of asylum for Julian Assange, the kidnapping and murder of three journalists, the confrontation with his predecessor Rafael Correa, the financial holes, the violent riots of October 2019 and, to close, the coronavirus pandemic, have marked an administration almost under siege. 

Is he relieved to leave the presidency? "Yes, quite a lot. Quite a lot of relief but, above all, the relief of having done my duty", he answers in an interview with Efe, in the yellow room of the Carondelet Palace, the historic seat of government since before Ecuador's independence. 

There, among its high ceilings and classic decoration, he shows himself as the most honest Moreno, who in April 2018 was faced with the demands of a drug trafficker "Guacho" to free two of his men on pain of murdering the three journalists from the newspaper El Comercio; or to eliminate subsidies on gasoline, which led to a wave of violence that left a dozen dead and some 1,500 injured. 

"I thought it was fair because it was only benefiting the rich, drug traffickers and fuel traffickers", says the president about that resolution, which was later repealed, but which he says "I regret", because "surely it was not the right time and there was not enough dialogue".

As an exercise in self-criticism, he also regrets "not having been more proactive and controlling" in the management of hospitals at the beginning of the pandemic, when a series of overpricing in the sale of medical supplies was discovered at a time when the country needed them most. 
And the failure to "go much deeper" in the dialogue with all sectors and "turn it into a state policy". 

The 68-year-old Moreno, who will leave office on May 24 ("it is dangerous for a person to remain in power forever"), may have been marked to some extent by the vicissitudes of an "unforeseen transition", as no one anticipated that, after being promoted by Correa's supporters, he would break with them so quickly. 

He did have changes in mind (restoring national dialogue and improving foreign relations), but what marked the break and the beginning of the transition, he confesses, was finding a country mired in debt and corruption. 

It has been almost four years in office in which Ecuador has moved away from the ideology of "21st century socialism" and initiated anti-corruption legal proceedings against its top representatives, which have earned Moreno the insult of "traitor" from his ex-allies. 

Insults to which he says he feels absolute indifference because: "When one does not accept the insult, the insult is returned to the person who utters it". 

"Human beings are designed to change (...) and we always have the possibility of changing when we find that things are not working in the right way", he explains when asked about this unexpected turn of events, evoking an interview with the British economist John Maynard Keynes back in the 1930s. 

Keynes, Nietzsche, Kennedy, Piaf, Aznavour, Llosa, Bolívar, or "Sauron" himself, from Lord of the Rings, are some of the numerous sources Moreno draws on throughout the interview to arm his decisions with a less political essence, and with which he sometimes leaves his interlocutor puzzled.

He does not hesitate to answer that his greatest achievements are to have given his country back a "freedom" that had been "unfortunately permanently curtailed under the previous government", as well as "dialogue", "having learned, sometimes the hard way and usually the good way", which is the "best mechanism to be able to change, if what the other person says is convincing". 

Last but not least, "leaving the accounts in order", because "we found a country in which debt repayments were greater than the education and health budgets combined". 

A debt that afflicted, afflicts and will continue to afflict Ecuador despite the more than 11 billion dollars that Moreno has obtained from international organisations and the US  (its greatest ally) for 2020 and 2021, because with the pandemic the "hot potato" has become bigger, although there were few alternatives in the face of such a crisis. 

A problem for which Moreno only sees a solution of "love", although it may "sound corny", and for which he proposes "teaching children to love their homeland" because "one works for the things one loves, and the things one loves are not stolen". 

In a country where the cost of corruption was estimated two years ago at $70 billion and the debt is around $60 billion, the two phenomena are intrinsically linked. 

At the end of his term of office, his right-wing detractors attribute to him an "incomplete transition", and those on the Correa left attribute to him the ruination of his ten-year national and social project. 

Ideologies aside, and without really considering himself a transitional government, Moreno believes that "the only good thing to do is to leave the path laid out and, if the next government decides to straighten it out in a better way, so much the better". 

"Regardless of who the chosen candidate is, I want to leave a better country than the one I found", he concluded.