Correa from boyhood leader to firebrand president

QUITO: Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa held his first Cabinet meetings more than 35 years before he was elected.

As an 8-year-old boy in the bustling port city of Guayaquil, according to his brother, he would play head of state with his friends who gathered around him to serve as ersatz ministers taking his orders.

The innate charisma that he showed as a schoolboy has helped make Correa one of the Andean nation's most popular presidents, celebrated as a champion of the poor by supporters from windswept highlands to sweltering Amazon jungle.

Yet critics might see in those childhood games the authoritarian traits of a leader they now accuse of hoarding power: he somehow always managed to be the chief.

"I used to say to his friends, 'when you play cops and robbers, sometimes you're the cop and sometimes you're the robber,'" said Correa's brother, Fabricio, once a close ally who is now a fierce critic after a theatrical falling out.

"'But you guys are always the stooges and he's always the president,'" he said in an interview.

Despite polarized views on Correa, opinion polls show the country of 15 million people is almost certain to hand him a new term in a presidential election Sunday. That would allow him to continue his "Citizens' Revolution" that vows to fight grinding poverty and expand the reach of the state.

A savvy political operator, the 49-year-old Correa has built up solid support by boosting state spending on health and education.

His aggressive anti-American rhetoric and showdowns with Wall Street investors and oil companies have helped him build the image of a populist crusader battling elites in the name of the poor.

To detractors, however, Correa is a dangerous and impulsive authoritarian who brooks no dissent and persecutes adversaries while squashing free speech and free enterprise alike.

They say his political success has come from a vast expansion of presidential powers and indiscriminate use of government coffers swollen by rising global crude prices, higher taxes, and financing agreements with China.

A victory on Feb. 17 would give him another four years in office, extending his tenure to a decade, a remarkable feat in a country where military coups and violent protests had turned the presidency into more of a revolving door than a stable institution.

It could also give Correa a bigger leadership role in a coalition of left-wing leaders in Latin America as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, for years the region's agent provocateur, struggles with life-threatening cancer.

Though Correa has said he is not interested in replacing Chavez, he is likely to continue replicating the Venezuelan's ferocious verbal bashing of the US "empire."

He has canceled US anti-narcotics flights from Ecuador, and in 2011 he expelled the American ambassador.

Last year, he set his government on a new collision course with Western powers when he allowed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to take refuge at Ecuador's embassy in London, saying he feared Washington wanted to persecute the ex-computer hacker for leaking thousands of secret US cables.