Populista: The Rise of Latin America's 21st Century Strongman by Will Grant

Author:Will Grant [Grant, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, World, Caribbean & Latin American, History, Latin America, General, Political Ideologies, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Imperialism, Fascism & Totalitarianism, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781789543988
Google: PqyfEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-01-07T17:40:24.513475+00:00

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In 1995, Rafael Correa’s father killed himself. He never saw his son rise to the most powerful position in the country and join a select group of left-wing leaders who were changing the region and making headlines around the world.

‘My father was someone who deserved a better life’, Correa told me with an almost imperceptible shake of the head, some two and a half decades after his father’s suicide. The seventh Rafael was considered to be much like his father in character – sharing an unyielding, almost blinkered vision of the world. It meant the two of them butted heads often, as his father had with his grandfather. He was the son who felt the loss most keenly.

Yet his father’s suicide wasn’t the episode that most deeply affected Rafael Correa. Just eleven months older than Bernardita, Rafael was closest to her in age and affection. On 28 May 1976, Bernardita’s school day was cut short. A classmate asked her mother if Bernardita could come over to play, and the mother asked Norma’s permission. Norma was doubtful – she knew her youngest was headstrong and could be hard to control. Still, faced with a complicated day because of the abrupt cessation of classes by lunchtime, she relented.

Wearing a small lilac swimming costume, Bernardita headed down to the pool inside the condominium complex. The friend’s mother was either absent or not sufficiently vigilant, and the Correa Delgado family’s youngest, Rafael’s baby sister, drowned face down in the pool. When Fabricio received the fateful call he ran desperately to fetch his father and they made their way to the hospital where she had been taken, still unclear as to her condition. ‘She died,’ was the blunt response of the nurse when they reached the clinic. ‘Bananita’ was gone. She was just twelve.

‘I think it marked me more than anything else, the tragedy of my sister,’ Rafael Correa reflected over our second cup of black coffee in a cafeteria in Belgium. ‘It was tough when she died, a hard blow.’

Fabricio, who had dashed to the hospital with his distraught father, agrees it was especially hard on his younger brother. ‘Pierina and I were at an age where we would go on holiday with our aunts and uncles or on trips with our cousins. The youngest two were the ones who spent most time together and with my mother.’

He says the family’s faith pulled them through. ‘[Bernardita] became like a saint. For me she’s my guardian angel watching over me, over my children, over my grandchildren.’ While Rafael Correa’s childhood was not necessarily the dirt-poor struggle of some Latin American political leaders – Evo Morales in Bolivia or Lula da Silva in Brazil, for example – he certainly experienced his fair share of family suffering before he reached puberty.

As Rafael Correa reached his teens, he had lost a sister, watched his parents divorce and would find out in due course that his father had trafficked cocaine into the US. Yet those experiences seemed to give the sensitive boy a certain steel which he began to focus into leadership qualities.

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