The election of a market-friendly banker to president of Ecuador will be a new ally for the US in Latin America, a region overrun with populist leaders whose priorities often don’t align with Washington’s.
But Guillermo Lasso, who handily defeated his left rival on Sunday, will also have to court the Biden administration’s biggest rival, China. Mr. Lasso, who is 65, faces the challenge of digging his country out of the worst economic crisis in a generation, the product of a Covid-19 pandemic that killed more than 17,000 people.
“In any case, Lasso is very pragmatic, and in Ecuador that today requires close relationships with the United States and also with China,” said Michael Shifter, chairman of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy group. “The country is in a difficult situation, and taking sides or excluding one of them is not realistic.”
Ecuador is now so saddled with debt to Beijing that its treasury is running low, forcing the country to restructure its debt to private creditors and take a $ 6.5 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund.
Under President Rafael Correa, who served until 2017 and led his country away from the US to China, Beijing’s generosity built everything from dams to mines to hospitals. The debt burden is enormous – $ 18.4 billion, the third highest in Latin America and after two much larger countries, Brazil and Venezuela, according to the Inter-American Dialogue.