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| - Ecuador, which holds a run-off presidential election on Sunday, is a small oil-rich South American country mired in an economic crisis worsened by the Covid pandemic. Wedged between the Andes mountains and the Pacific, this nation of 17.4 million people is home to the marine-rich Galapagos archipelago and gave WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange refuge in its London embassy for seven years. Once part of the Inca Empire, Ecuador was ruled by Spain until 1822 when it became part of liberation hero Simon Bolivar's short-lived Latin American superstate, Gran Colombia. Independent since 1830, it has suffered several decades of dictatorship, the last between 1972 and 1979. But democracy did not always bring stability, with three presidents chased from office by massive protests between 1997 and 2006. The 2006 election of left-wing former economist Rafael Correa brought a decade of much-needed calm. He was re-elected in 2009 after the adoption of a constitution reinforcing state control of the economy, and again in 2013. In 2012 he irked the United States when he granted asylum to Assange in Ecuador's London embassy. Correa was succeeded in 2017 by his former deputy Lenin Moreno, who is wheelchair-bound after being shot during a robbery in 1998. Moreno and Correa clashed in 2018 when the erstwhile deputy held a referendum on presidential term limits, thus preventing Correa's return. In July 2019 Moreno withdrew Assange's asylum, and police carried him from the London embassy. Correa, who now lives in exile in Belgium, was sentenced to eight years in prison for corruption last year, scuppering his hopes to stand for vice president. Moreno is not seeking re-election and will stand down on May 24. Instead Andres Arauz, a protege of Correa's, and conservative former banker Guillermo Lasso are going head-to-head in the second round vote. Left-wing indigenous leader Yaku Perez claims fraud kept him out of the run-off. Ecuador is one of the Latin American countries worst hit by the pandemic, which has aggravated its economic crisis. In 2020 its economy contracted by 7.8 percent. Ecuador is the world's largest banana exporter and a major producer of coffee and cocoa. It also produces more than 476,000 barrels of oil a day, two-thirds of which are exported. While prices were high, oil boosted Ecuador's growth, reducing poverty and inequality. But the drop in crude prices has caused revenues to plummet. With its economy dollarized since 2000, the rise of the US currency has driven it into still further debt and it left the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) last year. The government's scrapping of fuel subsidies in October 2019 as part of an agreement with the International Monetary Fund sparked widespread protests and the shutdown of oil wells. The crisis left 11 dead and 1,340 injured before the controversial decree was withdrawn. The IMF approved a $6.5 billion aid plan in September weeks after the government agreed with some of its creditors to restructure $17.4 billion of its debt. Ecuador's marine-rich Galapagos archipelago is listed as a world heritage site by UNESCO. But the country also sits in a zone of high seismic activity, with about 100 volcanoes in an "avenue" along its slice of the Andes mountain chain. In 2016, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake killed 673 people and devastated a long stretch of Ecuador's coast. Amazonian rainforest covers part of Ecuador. Indigenous people including the Waorani Amerindians are threatened by the exploitation of oil resources there. English naturalist Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution after studying finches and mockingbirds on the Galapagos islands in 1835. One of the archipelago's smaller islands was later named after him. doc-ang/jmy/fg/bc/acb
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