VOTERS IN Ecuador have overwhelmingly approved a new constitution that will concentrate power in the hands of socialist president Rafael Correa, advance his reformist agenda and enable him to remain in office until 2017.
The constitution was drafted last summer by a special congress convened by Mr Correa, who was elected in a 2006 landslide by voters exasperated by his country's chronic corruption, political instability and ineffectual lawmakers.
Official results gave Mr Correa's constitution 65 per cent of the vote in Sunday's referendum, with almost half the votes counted, while a key opposition leader said Mr Correa had won. Voters were required to vote by law on the constitution as a package, not by individual provisions.
At a rally in Guayaquil after exit poll results were released, Mr Correa exulted in what he termed his "historic" victory and extended an olive branch to opponents.
"I call on all Ecuadoreans of goodwill and faith to put their shoulders and hearts together and build together the Ecuador that we have been fighting and hoping for and which starting today is approaching reality," he said.
Mr Correa is one of several left-wing Latin American leaders including Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales who have led the region's shift from free market neo-liberalism toward a stronger government hand in social programmes and natural resource policy.
Over the past decade, Ecuador has been Latin America's basket case, experiencing economic meltdowns and seven different presidents, three of whom were ousted by coups. The country tied its currency to the US dollar in 2000 to control runaway inflation.
Among the new provisions is one that gives the president the option of running for re-election.
As far as Mr Correa is concerned, he would be starting fresh with the new constitution, free to pursue the presidency in elections planned for next year and again in 2013 if victorious. So he could be in office until 2017.
The new laws also ascribe rights to nature, including a ban on transgenic crops, and permit civil unions of homosexual couples. It would also confirm a right to seek family planning advice, a provision the Roman Catholic Church opposed. Abortion is illegal.
Provisions that require farmland to be "socially useful" appear to give the state the power to confiscate unutilised properties and redistribute them to the poor. The nation's central bank will lose its autonomy and be subject to presidential policy.
"It's a mandate for profound national transformation," said Mr Correa supporter and assembly man Norman Wray.
Some legal analysts however have expressed alarm at the powers the constitution gives Mr Correa to control the branches of government. It would enable him to appoint a special council of citizen participation and social control whose powers could supersede those of elected governors, congress and bureaucrats.
The council may appoint a range of officials from bank regulators and prosecutors to the electoral commission and judges.
"Ecuador has long seen its governability blockaded by its politicians but I'm afraid this constitution is not going to help," said Simon Pachano, a political scientist at a Quito graduate school, Flacso. "It's only going to heighten the problems."
Felipe Mantilla, a former interior minister and now dean of the law school at Guayaquil's Spiritu Santo University, said the new constitution would create an ominous "hyper-presidentialism".
"This will guarantee the president's future interference in the judiciary, giving him the power potentially to review supreme court decisions, which will only create more legal insecurity," Mr Mantilla said.
Correa supporters in government have dismissed the notion that he or any president can gain excessive power. Lawmaker Paco Velasco referred to the three presidents who had been thrown out of office since 1997.
"Ecuador has a long history of rejecting presidents who try to avoid giving accounts, so I don't think that's going to be an issue," said Mr Velasco. "This will open the gates of democracy, not close them."
The lopsided victory showed most Ecuadoreans were squarely in Mr Correa's camp. Independent Quito historian and publisher Abdon Ubidia said Sunday's approval was a "vote against the past."
"We're voting for real social change, more equality, for the end of the neo-liberal era and toward a more human society," Mr Ubidia said. "It's a phenomenon happening across Latin American and we can't be left behind."
- (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)