Scraping the barrel

VISITORS arriving at Quito’s new airport are swept to Ecuador’s capital, 35km (22 miles) away, along a brand new six-lane motorway. Together with new hospitals, schools, social housing and benefits and student grants, the vastly improved road network is the work of President Rafael Correa’s “Citizens’ Revolution”. With his melange of technocratic modernisation and leftist populism, Mr Correa leads a strong and hitherto popular government that has lasted eight years in a country where none of his three predecessors completed their terms.

But now Mr Correa is running out of money and the citizens are starting to turn against him. In June, in the biggest of many protests, some 350,000 people took to the streets of the port city of Guayaquil to demonstrate against plans to impose punitive additional taxes on inheritances and gains from property transactions.