Do we like them?Do we like Rafael Correa?
Our score: 3 out of 10. A mixed record on harm and a mixed one on character, with a court conviction he denies and a heavy-handed run against critics outweighing the civil-union win.
Correa was president of Ecuador for a decade from 2007 and is now based in Europe. He has been out of the country since leaving office, and MercoPress reports that Belgium granted him political asylum in 2022. He remains a loud voice in Ecuadorian politics from abroad, which is why his name keeps coming up.
The big stain is a court one. In April 2020 Ecuador's National Court of Justice convicted him in the Sobornos 2012-2016 case and sentenced him in absentia to eight years for aggravated bribery. He has denied the charges and says the case is persecution. Ecuador asked for his extradition in 2022, but he has stayed in Europe.
The press record is the other mark against him. In 2011 he brought libel charges against the newspaper El Universo and its editor over a column that called him a dictator. A judge handed out three-year prison terms and fines of tens of millions of dollars. The Committee to Protect Journalists said it was alarmed that a democratically elected president would use such laws to silence critical reporting.
On the harm check, it is genuinely split. In 2014 he promised that same-sex couples could register civil unions with the same rights as other couples, and he warned that any official who turned a couple away would be sacked. But the same reporting notes that same-sex couples still could not marry. Press groups also criticised his government's 2013 Communications Law, which created a state watchdog. Fundamedios counted about 30 sanctions in its first year, and he regularly called journalists “ink assassins” in his weekend broadcasts.
The recent news is mostly more of the same: a loud life in exile, political feuds back home, and trips like the Uruguay visit that stir up the local opposition. The government in Montevideo said it had found no legal reason to stop his entry. Our searches also turned up Ecuadorian reporting on prosecutors' claims linking him to the 2023 Villavicencio murder, which he denies. We did not open those articles, so we have left them out of the evidence file.
The honest verdict: not a clean pass. The civil-union promise was a real step for LGBTQ+ people. A decade of attacks on critical reporting, a bribery conviction he denies and a feud-heavy exile make it hard to back him with a straight face. The record isn't empty of good, so this is a lean no rather than a flat rejection.