GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (AP) - A former army colonel leading in the first round of Ecuador's presidential elections defended himself Monday against accusations that he is a communist.
Lucio Gutierrez, who will likely face banana magnate Alvaro Noboa in a runoff vote on Nov. 24, said: "The communist thing isn't accurate."
"I'm a military man and as a result I have no ideological formation, no political doctrine. My only ideology is my country, the Ecuadorean people," Gutierrez, 45, said in a television interview.
Gutierrez was the surprise of Sunday's elections, surging from fourth place in pre-elections polls to take the lead with 20.3 percent, with 62 percent of the votes tallied. Vote counting continued Monday.
If no candidate receives 50 percent of the vote, the two top vote-getters meet in a runoff. The second place candidate, Noboa, had 17.4 percent support.
Noboa set the tone of what will likely be his campaign for the runoff when he noted that a communist party was supporting Gutierrez's bid for the presidency.
"I am going to tell the Ecuadorean people that they have two choices: the communism that Lucio Gutierrez represents ... and jobs, health and economic reactivation, which I represent," he said at a news conference in Guayaquil Sunday night.
Gutierrez burst onto Ecuador's turbulent political scene in January 2000 when he led a group of junior army officers and thousands of Indian protesters in a coup that toppled an unpopular president in the midst of Ecuador's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
He turned over power to his military commanders, who then swore in Jamil Mahuad's vice president as the new president and expelled Gutierrez from the army for his rebellion.
Gutierrez admitted that he admires Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez, a former paratrooper who also rebelled against an unpopular president.
"I admire courage in people. President Chavez risked his military career, risked his life to challenge a government considered corrupt. Lucio Gutierrez did the same thing in Ecuador and that's where the comparison ends," he said.
On the campaign trail Gutierrez wears green army fatigues and combat boots, much in the same way that Chavez is given to wearing military clothing. He is supported by Ecuador's powerful Indian movement, leftist-led unions and a small Marxist party, the Democratic Popular Movement, as well as some members of the Socialist Party.
He described himself as belonging to the center-left and said he hoped Ecuadoreans would let him show them what he stands for before judging him unfairly.
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