Ecuadorean President Lucio Gutiérrez said Tuesday that he wanted to start bilateral talks with the United States for a free-trade agreement ahead of the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
In addition, he called for the hemisphere to have a single currency system.
''With respect to the FTAA, Ecuador supports its creation,'' he told The Herald's Americas Conference. ``Negotiating for the FTAA is not opposed to negotiating bilaterally. We have communicated to the United States that we would like a free-trade agreement between our two countries.''
Gutiérrez was the principal speaker on the first day of the two-day conference at The Biltmore in Coral Gables, where free trade was one of the main themes. His remarks stood in contrast to those made earlier in the day by Argentine and Brazilian officials during a panel discussion; they'd said the U.S. stance of negotiating bilateral agreements apart from the FTAA creates uneven playing fields.
Gutiérrez, however, did agree with his larger neighbors in South America that the United States must eliminate agricultural subsidies and be sensitive to the needs of small, developing countries.
And one way to ensure fair competition for all countries, he said, is to use a common currency. Ecuador's currency is the U.S. dollar, though Gutiérrez didn't say countries in the Americas should all switch to the dollar.
''A single monetary system would permit all countries to function equally,'' he said.
A former army colonel who staged a short-lived coup against President Jamil Mahuad in 2000, Gutiérrez was elected president last year after serving six months in prison. He took office in January amid trepidation that he would implement a left-leaning populism similar to Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, also a former army coup plotter.
But Gutiérrez has since put those fears to rest with pragmatic policies. Foreign investment has surged 189 percent in the first eight months of 2003 as compared to 2002, according to figures from the Ecuadorean government.
During Gutiérrez's 10 months in office, one of his pet projects has been to encourage punctuality -- both for civil servants starting their workdays and for public trains. The government estimates that chronic tardiness costs Ecuador 3.4 percent of its gross domestic product.
Gutiérrez, who campaigned on a hard-line platform against graft, called corruption one of Latin America's greatest scourges that has bled its people of resources needed to combat poverty.
One example, he said, was Ecuador's banking collapse that led to an economic crisis starting in 1999.
''I demand international support to extradite the corrupt bankers who bankrupted my country,'' Gutiérrez said. ``These wrongdoers must be detained, the money must be returned.''
Some of those bankers live in South Florida, including William and Roberto Isaías, who once owned Ecuador's largest bank. The Isaías brothers could not be reached to comment, but the Isaías family has said government regulators were to blame for the bank failure.
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