MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Leading Ecuadorian candidate rides on anti-US feeling

The Ecuadorian presidential candidate leading public opinion polls said that if elected he will not extend a current agreement enabling United States to undertake counter drugs operations from a strategic air base in Ecuador.

Former Vice President Leon Roldos meeting this week with foreign journalists said that he will "not even consider" renewing the agreement regarding the Manta airbase which US officials would like to see extended until 2012. "Under no circumstances," Roldos said, "will the extension proceed".

Roldos also suggested that the agreement, set to expire in 2009, might be in jeopardy if Washington fails to renew the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, or ATPDEA, which ends next December 31.

This initiative has enabled Ecuador and neighbouring countries to export goods to United States free of tariffs since the early nineties, basically a reward to the Andean countries for their cooperation in the war on drugs.

"For Ecuador, non-renewal of ATPDEA would imply the loss of 100,000 direct jobs and 200,000 indirect jobs" Quito's envoy to the United States, Luis Gallegos, warned last June.

While Peru and Colombia have since signed broad free trade agreements with the United States that, if ratified by the US Congress, will cushion if not eliminate any fallout from the end of ATPDEA, neither Ecuador or Bolivia have done so.

Talks with Washington on a trade deal stalled earlier this year over Ecuadorian moves against U.S. oil company Occidental Petroleum over a contract dispute.

Roldos also anticipated that if he wins next October 15, he will hold a national referendum on Ecuador's international trade policies and political reform.

"I believe in a national trade strategy which does not bind us with an only associate but rather with all areas possible, be it the European Union, East Asia".

"It's the Ecuadorian people who must say what the guidelines on foreign trade are" added Roldos who is leading a centre-left alliance in the mid October election.

The candidate refused to say whether he would accept or seek the resumption of the suspended trade talks with the United States.