Leon Roldós

León Roldós, 2008

León Roldós Aguilera (born July 21, 1942 in Guayaquil ) is an Ecuadorian lawyer and politician . He was vice president of his country from 1981 to 1984 and ran for president in 1992, 2002 and 2006 without success.

Roldós' father Santiago Roldós Soria was a politician and held high office in the 1940s. Among other things, he was governor of the Guayas province, minister of social affairs and in 1946/47 Consul General of Ecuador in Buenos Aires , where León Roldós started school. His mother died of internal bleeding when he was born. His father later married his first wife's sister. In 1947 the family returned to Ecuador, where Roldós graduated from high school in 1960.

He studied law at Guayaquil University and worked as a teacher in city schools. In 1969 he completed his studies as a lawyer. In 1969/70 he was secretary of the populist mayor of Guayaquil, Assad Bucaram , the founder and leader of the party Concentración de Fuerzas Populares . Roldos was later a lawyer and taught at universities in Guayaquil. In his first function, he worked for various banks and banking supervisors, among other things, and in a second function was temporarily dean of the law faculty at the Universidad Laica Vicente Rocafuerte in Guayaquil.

In 1979, his brother Jaime Roldós was elected president of Ecuador as a candidate for an electoral alliance of the Concentración de Fuerzas Populares with the Christian Democratic Democracia Popular . León Roldós subsequently became chairman of the Junta Monetaria in 1979 , which oversaw the country's currency reserves and the central bank, among other things.

Jaime Roldós died on May 24, 1981 in a plane crash. The Vice President Osvaldo Hurtado was then his successor. The National Congress appointed León Roldós as the new vice-president, who held this office until the end of the 1984 legislative period. Roldós and Hurtado repeatedly disagreed, particularly on political measures. Among other things, Roldós opposed the “ sucretization ” of Ecuador's external debt, a measure that included the Ecuadorian government assuming the losses incurred by private companies due to the exchange rate risk of loans taken out abroad.

He then worked again as a lawyer and consultant and as a university lecturer and published several books. From 1992 to 1996 he was a member of the board of directors of the Bank Banco de Estado , from 1998 to 2002 Member of Parliament for the Guayas Province in the National Congress.

On October 31, 1994, Roldós was elected Rector of the University of Guayaquil and held this post for two terms (until 2004). Its rectorate is generally attested that it managed transparently and led to an improvement in study conditions and the reputation of the state university.

Roldós was a candidate for the presidency in 1992 (for the Socialist Party of Ecuador ) and 2002 (as an independent candidate for the Movimiento Ciudadano Nuevo País ). In 1992 he took sixth place in the first ballot; In 2002 he received the third most votes with 15.4 percent in the first ballot and again failed to reach the second ballot. In the 2006 elections, he stood as a joint candidate of his party Red Ética y Democracia, founded in 2005, and the established social democratic Izquierda Democrática . In the polls for voting intent, he was in first place for a long time, but was overtaken shortly before the election of Rafael Correa , who was nominated by a separate election platform and the Socialist Party. Surprisingly, he only came fourth in the elections, which raised doubts in Ecuador about the quality of pre-election polls, which apparently gave too little attention to rural lower classes.

Since November 2007 he was one of the 24 national MPs for his party RED in the Constituent Assembly of Ecuador 2007/08 , which gave the country a new constitution, which was passed in September 2008.

Roldós was married to Mercedes María Icaza Olivera , who died in 2005, and has one son, León Xavier.

Web links

• Homepage (spanish)
• Rodolfo Pérez Pimentel, León Roldós Aguilera , In: Diccionario Biográfico del Ecuador , Guayaquil 1987–, Volume 6, pp. 254f. (Spanish)