Rafael Correa

Biography: He is the President of the Republic of Ecuador and was the president pro tempore of the Union of South American Nations. An economist educated in Ecuador, Belgium and the United States, he was elected President in late 2006 and took office in January 2007. In December 2008, he declared Ecuador?s national debt illegitimate, based on the argument that it had been contracted by corrupt/despotic prior regimes. He then pledged to fight creditors in international courts, and succeeded in reducing the price of the debt letters and continued paying all the debt. He brought Ecuador into the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas in June 2009.

Correa?s first term in office had been due to end on January 15, 2011, but the new approved constitution written by the new National Assembly mandated general elections for April 26, 2009. In that election, Rafael Correa won in the first round with 51.9% of votes counted. It was the first time since 1979 in which a representative was elected without having to face a second round. Consequently, Correa began a new term in office due to end on August 10, 2013, which could be extended by re-election until 2017. To date, Correa?s administration has succeeded in reducing high levels of poverty, indigence, and unemployment.

A descendant of the Chilean politician Rafael Correa of Saa and Lazon, Rafael Correa comes from a working class family. They used to live in Guayaquil. His father was Rafael Correa Icaza, born in the Province of Los Rios, Ecuador and his mother is Norma Delgado Rendon.

His parents had three more children: Fabricio Correa, Pierina Correa; Bernardita Correa. He is married to Anne Malherbe, a teacher of Belgian nationality born in 1969, who he met in 1990 at the Catholic University of Louvain. The couple have three children: Sofía, Anne Dominique and Miguel. Correa is a devout Roman Catholic. Apart from his native tongue of Spanish, he speaks English, French, and Quechua.

He carried out his primary and secondary studies in the Catholic school San Jose-La Salle, of Guayaquil.

Thanks to his good academic qualifications, he obtained a scholarship to study in the Catholic University of Santiago from Guayaquil, a private institution of the Ecuador, where he finally graduated in economy in 1987. In 1993 he was a director in the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) of the Ecuador, with administrative competitions in programs of improvement of the national educational system financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Following graduation, he worked for one year in a mission at a kindergarten run by the Salesian order in Zumbahua, Cotopaxi Province, a rural town of extreme poverty where Correa lent literacy works to indigenous and microenterprise development, also where he acquired some knowledge of Quechua, the language of the majority of the indigenous population concentrated in the Andes region of Ecuador. In addition to Spanish and Quechua, he speaks French and English.

In June 1991, he received a Master of Arts in Economics from the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He later studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a Master of Science in Economics in May 1999, and later a PhD in Economics in October 2001.

Rafael Correa was officially declared President of Ecuador on 4 December 2006 by the country?s electoral court