QUITO, Ecuador (Reuters) - Former coup leader Lucio Gutierrez, who won the most votes in the first round of Ecuador's presidential election, appealed for national unity on Monday, but the businessman he will face in a Nov. 24 runoff called him a dangerous communist who would wreck the economy.
Fresh from winning a surprise first place in Sunday's tight first-round vote, Gutierrez, 45, asked the nation's political leaders to join with him.
"I call on political leaders to start a dialogue. It is time for national unity," Gutierrez, a retired army colonel, told private television channel TC, wearing his trademark olive-green uniform.
Gutierrez, who helped lead a 2000 Indian revolt that overthrew President Jamil Mahuad and installed then-Vice President Gustavo Noboa as leader of the world's top banana exporter, won 20.3 percent of the vote against 10 other candidates, with 95.7 percent of polling stations counted.
Billionaire banana tycoon Alvaro Noboa, 51, Ecuador's richest man, won 17.4 percent of the vote, placing second. He is not related to the president, who did not run in the election.
Gutierrez will face Noboa in the runoff after neither man attracted enough votes for an outright victory in an election in which skeptical voters, tired of corruption and incompetence, punished traditional politicians. Abstention reached 35 percent despite the fact that voting is mandatory.
Noboa, a lawyer from the industrial hub of Guayaquil who gave out free handouts of medicine to the poor and once broadcast on national television his son's lavish baptism at New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral, sought to sow fear over the possibility of a Gutierrez victory.
"The people will have to choose between a Fidel Castro-styled communist government and a government of private firms, jobs and economic recovery," Noboa said.
Gutierrez, a former pentathlete who ran on an anti-establishment ticket backed by poor Indians and radical leftist groups, denied he was a communist.
'I AM A MILITARY MAN'
"I am a military man. Communists don't believe in God and I am profoundly Christian," he told Reuters in an interview on Monday at his Quito headquarters.
Gutierrez has been compared with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, a former paratrooper who led a botched coup before being elected president. Gutierrez has expressed admiration for Chavez's "bravery," and has said he will implement the "political model of Jesus Christ" for the "poor and barefoot."
Ecuador's sovereign debt fell some 6 percent on Monday as Wall Street worried that either Gutierrez or Noboa would put the Andean economy on a less-than-market-friendly path.
Both Gutierrez and Noboa have been vague on a possible deal with the International Monetary Fund, basing their campaigns on fighting corruption and poverty.
Analysts say the new president will need an accord with the IMF to sustain investors' confidence after Ecuador defaulted on part of its foreign debt in 1999, when the economy contracted by 7.3 percent. In 2000, the government adopted the U.S. dollar.
Gutierrez "is basically very non-market-friendly and Noboa doesn't have a whole lot of experience and people don't really know him too well," said one emerging debt trader in New York who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It's kind of a shock these two guys got through."
The outcome dealt a blow to Ecuador's political establishment The country is rich in oil, but more than half of its 12 million people live in poverty.
It has a history of political turbulence and economic chaos as a Spanish-descended elite has failed to create prosperity for an overwhelmingly mixed population. Two past presidents were overthrown amid massive protests.
(Additional reporting by Amy Taxin and Isabel Proano in Quito and Susan Schneider in New York)
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