Rafael Correa

Using its own form of 21st century socialism, Correa's administration increased government spending, reducing poverty, raising the minimum wage and increasing the standard of living in Ecuador.

Correa's father was Rafael Correa Icaza, born in the Province of Los Ríos, Ecuador, (23 March 1934 – 10 June 1995) while his mother is Norma Delgado Rendón (born 1 September 1939).

He had three siblings; Fabricio Correa, Pierina Correa and Bernardita Correa.

Having grown up in the coastal city of Guayaquil, he has described his family background as being that of the "lower middle class".

When Correa was five, his father was arrested and imprisoned for three years after attempting to smuggle illegal narcotics into the United States.

Publicly acknowledging this incident while president, Correa stated that "I do not condone what he did [but] drug smugglers are not criminals. They are single mothers or unemployed people who are desperate to feed their families".

Correa was 18 when he was told about his father's actions.

While living in Guayaquil, Correa was highly involved in the Boy Scout program.

When he was 17, despite his family facing financial hardship, a family friend was paid for him to be educated at an elite local school, where he excelled.

During his secondary studies he was president of the Lasallian Student Cultural Association ("ACEL" in Spanish).

Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado (born 6 April 1963) is an Ecuadorian politician and economist who served as President of Ecuador from 2007 to 2017.

When attending UCSG, he was elected President of the Association of Students of Economy, Audit and Administration (AEAA) and, later on, President of the Federation of Students (FEUC) of the same education center, a position which in 1986 allowed him to preside over the Private Universities Students Federation of Ecuador (FEUPE in Spanish).

Following the conclusion of his studies at UCSG, Correa worked for a year in a mission at a kindergarten run by the Salesian order in Zumbahua, Cotopaxi Province, where he taught Catholicism and mathematics.

It was here that he furthered his faith in Catholicism, and developed a working understanding of the Quechua language spoken by most of Ecuador's indigenous people.

He then secured a scholarship to study economics further at UCLouvain in Belgium, where he met Anne Malherbe Gosselin, whom he married and has three children with.

Correa then obtained a scholarship to study at the Catholic University of Santiago de Guayaquil (UCSG), a private higher education institution in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he obtained an undergraduate degree in economics in 1987.

He later received a Master of Arts in Economics from UCLouvain in June 1991.

Correa was able to afford a university education with the aid of funding grants.

Between 1992 and 1993, during the presidency of Sixto Durán Ballén, Correa was a director at the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) in Ecuador, tasked with administrative oversight and supervision of improvement programs for the national educational system.

The improvement programs were funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

He continued his studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a Master of Science in economics in May 1999, and a PhD in economics in October 2001.

Returning to Ecuador, Correa secured a position at the University of San Francisco in Quito, where he taught economics.

At the same time, he worked as an economic adviser to state and international agencies.

During this period, Ecuador experienced a banking crisis and the government of President Jamil Mahuad replaced the Ecuadorean sucre currency with the U.S. dollar.

Correa was highly critical of this dollarisation policy, arguing against it in various academic publications that he produced at the time.

Born to a lower middle-class Mestizo family in Guayaquil, Correa studied economics at the Universidad Católica de Santiago de Guayaquil, the University of Louvain (UCLouvain), and the University of Illinois, where he received his PhD. Returning to Ecuador, in 2005 he became the Minister for the Economy under President Alfredo Palacio, successfully lobbying Congress for increased spending on health and education projects.

Correa won the presidency in the 2006 general election on a platform criticizing the established political elites.

Between 2006 and 2016, poverty decreased from 36.7% to 22.5% and annual per capita GDP growth was 1.5 percent (as compared to 0.6 percent over the prior two decades).

At the same time, economic inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, decreased from 0.55 to 0.47.

Taking office in January 2007, he sought to move away from Ecuador's neoliberal economic model by reducing the influence of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

He oversaw the introduction of a new constitution, being re-elected in 2009 and again in the 2013 general election.

Correa's presidency was part of the Latin American pink tide, a turn toward leftist governments in the region, allying himself with Hugo Chávez's Venezuela and bringing Ecuador into the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas in June 2009.

By the end of Correa's tenure, the 50% drop in the price of oil since 2014 had caused Ecuador's economy to enter a recession, resulting in government spending being slashed.

The leader of the PAIS Alliance political movement from its foundation until 2017, Correa is a democratic socialist and his administration focused on the implementation of left-wing policies.

Internationally, he served as president pro tempore of the UNASUR.

On 3 July 2018, a judge in Ecuador ordered a warrant for the arrest of Correa after he failed to appear in court during a trial surrounding the kidnapping of his political opponent Fernando Balda.

Correa, who lived in Belgium at the time, denied the allegations regarding the kidnapping.

In July 2018 Interpol rejected an Ecuador-issued arrest warrant and called it "obviously a political matter."

In April 2020 the Criminal Court of the National Court of Justice found the former president guilty of aggravated passive bribery in the Caso Sobornos 2012-2016.

He was sentenced in absentia to 8 years in prison.