Victory. On the night he won Ecuador’s presidential election, Lenín Moreno sat atop the stage with a microphone in his hand, salt and pepper hair coifed perfectly, as it always is. Television cameras captured the scene as the 64 year old led the crowd in song.

Venceremos! Venceremos! Mil cadenas habra que romper!

(We shall overcome! We shall overcome! A thousand chains we’ll have to break!)

He was flanked by his wife, father, Vice President Jorge Glass, and Raphael Correa, the current president, who had led Ecuador for the past 10 years. Moreno sat in front of his retinue and sang, smoothly and powerfully, like a balladeer, while a sign language interpreter danced and signed to the crowd.

Venceremos! La miseria sabremeos vencer.

(We shall overcome! We know how to overcome misery.)

The scene might have appeared cheesy if it had been dominated by the bullish persona of Correa, who stalked the stage just to Moreno’s left, wearing a grin two sizes too large. Correa succumbs easily to the stereotype of populist strongman, but as politicians go, Moreno offers something more genuine than his predecessor. He wore a thick scarf of emerald green draped gracefully around the shoulders of his sport coat and a pale blue shirt with the top two buttons undone. In between lyrics, he smiled, looking supremely comfortable in his own skin. Moreno’s paraplegia appeared rather subordinate to the scene as a whole. It’s not that you don’t notice the wheelchair, it’s just that you notice Moreno first. The lyrics of overcoming, when sung by such a man, seem less political theater and more like a statement of fact.

An Unknown Rises

“Power comes with a stroke of fortune and you should quickly leave it behind. But while you are in that space, you must take advantage of it to realize your dearest ambition. For me, that was to promote the rights of the disabled.” — Lenín Moreno, in a 2013 interview with The Guardian.

The list of circumstances Lenín Voltaire Moreno overcame to reach his present position as the first wheelchair user to be elected head of state of a country since Franklin D. Roosevelt begins with his birthplace. Nuevo Rocafuerte is a small town, inaccessible by road, located deep within the Amazon jungle on the border with Peru, far closer to the biodiversity of Yasuní National Park than to the country’s political power center in Quito.

Moreno’s parents were both educators. His father was a professor involved with integrating the indigenous community into the local schools. “Dad had socialist ideas and mom had liberal ideas. They liked to read a lot; for dad, it was Lenin, for mom, Voltaire,” Moreno explained.

He adopted his father’s socialist leanings, joining the “Movement of the Revolutionary Left” while a university student. However, his political ideology didn’t prevent him from going into the business world and building a career in sales and marketing before moving to a government tourism post. If his path had continued uninterrupted, it’s unlikely that Moreno would have strayed beyond the comfortable confines of the upwardly mobile. But that changed in 1998.

Moreno was in a grocery store parking lot in Quito when two men approached and demanded his wallet and his car. He handed over his wallet, but one of the men shot him, and the bullet impacted his spinal cord, paralyzing him. Moreno’s biggest issue with his injury was chronic pain, something that left him both unmotivated and depressed. He had a few hard years before noticing one day that as he laughed at a friend’s joke, for a few moments he didn’t notice his pain. The revelation led him to laughter therapy, and he found that by integrating humor into his everyday life, he could lessen and move past his pain.

Despite his injury, Moreno was lucky, in that he was already an educated, successful businessman at the time of his injury. His relative wealth and connections allowed him to escape the life that awaited many Ecuadorians with disabilities at the time — one of familial dependency.

Moreno went back to school and studied both medicine and psychology before finding his niche in public administration and graduating at the top of his class. He worked for a while as a disability envoy for the Ecuadorian government, then as a motivational speaker, author, and eventually created a foundation — Eventa — that promoted the integration of humor into everyday life.

In 2005, he returned to his revolutionary ideals, joining the forajidos, a popular protest movement against the government of then-president Lucio Gutiérrez, who had originally come to power in a coup. The forajidos were successful in helping to topple Gutiérrez, paving the way for the wide-open 2006 presidential election.

Moreno’s political career began when Correa, the presidential candidate for the newly created Alianza Pais, a leftist political party, selected him to be his vice-presidential running mate. If you’re thinking that student radical, businessman, SCI survivor, laughter therapy devotee, government administrator, motivational speaker, revolutionary is a rather odd path for one to travel to a vice presidential bid, you wouldn’t be alone. At the time, a U.S. diplomatic cable about the move, later released by WikiLeaks, was titled “Correa Selects Unknown Running Mate.”

Outside of Ecuador, Moreno was unknown. Inside the country, he was known primarily for his work as a motivational speaker and his books on laughter therapy. But Moreno’s friendly, accessible nature and penchant for breaking into song at political rallies endeared him to Ecuadorian voters. Correa won in the second round of the 2006 elections, and Moreno was propelled to the highest levels of government office.

Riding a reputation as motivational speaker and joke-teller to the office of vice president was indeed an unusual path, but compiling a body of work as an advocate for disability rights on his path to the presidency may be even stranger, especially in a country where the disability rights movement had been more or less nonexistent before Moreno rose to political prominence.

Finding a Cause

“We were in no way prepared for what we would find: human beings left abandoned in virtual caves, in cages, with silence as their only companion and death, their only hope. Human beings, being made to feel shame and embarrassment. This situation will not be tolerated any longer in  Ecuador.” — Lenín Moreno, in a 2010 speech to the United Nations.

When Moreno was first elected to the vice presidency in 2006, no one was even sure how many people with disabilities there were in Ecuador. Many people with significant mobility impairments rarely left their homes. They were often taken care of by their families, but shut out of society.

One reason was, they might not have had access to a wheelchair. If they did, the likelihood of it being lightweight, ergonomic, and compact enough to be able to push themselves was even more remote. Even with a decent chair, where would they go? What could they do? It’s not surprising that those on the low-end of the function spectrum rarely left their homes.

One of the first programs Moreno launched was called Manuela Espejo, the first part of which simply sought to find and tally all the people with disabilities living in Ecuador. I encountered evidence of the need for this kind of basic disability awareness when I spent some time in Ecuador in 2014. My wife and I were on a long handcycle/bicycle trip through South America. At the time, I didn’t really know anything about Ecuador or the disability programs that Moreno had begun.

In Quito we met with two people involved with the Maximus Project, which had been using wheelchair rugby to promote social inclusion for people with disabilities throughout South America — Stevens Ruiz, who ran the Maximus Project for the Colombia-based Arc Angeles foundation, and Xavier Castro, who worked with para-sport and was helping to start the local wheelchair rugby team. Getting a team sport for quadriplegics started was a slow process, even in Quito, with a population of 2.7 million. Quads were hard to find. “They are here, just hidden,” said Ruiz. “After the hospital, they disappear into the city, sometimes they hardly ever leave their house.”

But what surprised me more, when I began to learn about the country’s history of disability rights, was how far the country had come already. Ecuador appeared to be similar to what we had seen in Mexico and Colombia: some curb cuts and the occasional ramp and elevator in big cities, while rural Ecuador offered very little in the way of accessibility — buildings had stairs, first floor businesses often had steps, doorways were narrow, and elevators nonexistent. Surprisingly though, nearly every gas station along the PanAmerican highway had a big, wheelchair accessible bathroom, the kind I’d be happy to find in the United States. These bathrooms were certainly new since Moreno’s rise to political prominence. For wheelchair-using Ecuadorians who wanted to travel in their own country, having access to bathrooms on the road might not change their entire lives, but it would certainly make an important difference.

Progress began when multidisciplinary groups (physicians, physiologists, physiotherapists, volunteers and others) visited the entire country looking for people with disabilities in towns, up in the mountains, and very small places with little access and hardly visited by anyone, according to Castro. “They made medical evaluations and gave them mattresses, sheets and other things, but mainly, they put them ‘on the map’ by having their names, medical history, location and more to make them part of the system.”

The second phase of Moreno’s approach to changing disability in Ecuador was multi-pronged. The government adopted a new constitution that gave legal protection to people with disabilities and signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Throughout his vice presidency, Moreno introduced a number of programs to assist people with disabilities: providing wheelchairs and prosthetics to those who needed them, access to medical care, and accessible housing. Moreno helped pass a law that requires Ecuadorian companies with a staff of over 25 people to reserve 4 percent of their positions for people with disabilities. The government began paying a monthly stipend to people with disabilities and caregivers who worked with them. They began installing curb cuts, ramps, and other accessibility features throughout the country and even started a factory to locally produce low-cost prosthetics. In the time that Moreno was vice president, government spending on disability programs increased from $2 million dollars U.S. to $150 million.

The actual programs were important, but the symbolism of a wheelchair user near the head of the government had its own power. To have Moreno, a paraplegic speaking from the pulpit of the vice presidency about the rights of those with disabilities, caused a societal paradigm shift. Before Moreno’s first term, people in Ecuador rarely even thought about disability. “Since then,” says Castro, “people in the country began hearing, seeing and realizing that people with disabilities did exist and were capable of doing everything. Before that, only those who had a member of their family with some ‘limitation’ understood their reality.”

The Road Ahead

“Solidarity — not as charity, but rather as the recognition of others as equals — is the basic pillar for initiating social inclusion. We political actors are temporary; we can, at best, give these great processes a push forward, but the true protagonists of these changes are society, people with disabilities and their families.” — Lenín Moreno, writing in Americas Quarterly

Roberto Sánchez, a 27-year-old wheelchair rugby player who lives in Quito, has had Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease — a type of muscular dystrophy — since he was a toddler. He has been using a wheelchair since age 19 but didn’t find wheelchair rugby until three years ago. For Sanchez, life revolves around many of the things that one could expect of a young man in Latin America — sport, music, traveling and dancing. “I study at the Universidad de los Hemisferios,” he says, “and the administration has been looking at how to better accommodate students with disabilities on campus, and at least they are paying attention and not forgetting about it.”

Overall, he’s happy with the progress made under Moreno but appears to worry that once Moreno fades from the political spotlight, the progress will disappear along with him. “Although a lot of things have gotten better for people with disabilities,” he says, “a lot still needs to change, and it’s a question of just doing it and not forgetting about it.”

Castro expressed a similar sentiment: “Many institutions began making their buildings more accessible (ramps, bathrooms, buses), many institutions began developing more plans (sports, recreation, culture, etc.) for people with disabilities … we have improved ages!” But at the same time, the employment law Moreno helped pass hasn’t been implemented nearly as well as it could be. “One important benefit for the private sector is to give jobs to people with disabilities and have a discount on their yearly taxes. But they are not doing it or taking advantage of it because they don’t know how to deal with people with disabilities, so they put them on the payroll but don’t make them work, or don’t hire them, because if they want to fire them later on, it’s too difficult.”

There are also those who work in the Latin American disability rights community who worry that Moreno’s policies amount to little more than “assistentialism” — government handouts to disadvantaged groups, which do little to affect the underlying structure of society. It’s a question that’s been debated for decades in American civil rights politics: How do you quickly reverse centuries of structural inequality without causing dependence on government programs?

But the mere fact of having a debate about the most productive ways to integrate people with disabilities into society is a mark of how far Ecuador has come in the past decade — from a country that didn’t even know how to find its citizens with disabilities to one that is at the forefront of the disability-rights-as-civil-rights debate.

For his work advancing the rights of people with disabilities, Moreno was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. He stepped down from the vice presidency in 2013 and soon was appointed as the United Nations Special Envoy on Disability. When Correa again selected Moreno in 2016 to lead the Alianza Pais — as its presidential candidate — Ecuadorians knew him not as a motivational speaker, but as an easy-going, soft-spoken leader who had made disability rights a priority during his time as vice president. That Ecuadorians voted him into power as president speaks to the power of a politician actually working to advance the interests of his constituents.

Whether Moreno will be an effective president remains to be seen. He has promised to continue and expand the programs for the disabled community that he began back in 2007, to expand a housing program for poor Ecuadorians, and to create 40 new technical universities across the country. But the election was close and hard-fought; there are many who do not approve of Moreno running the country. However, their objections are about his socialist politics, not his disability. As Ecuador’s president, Moreno will face the challenging project of leading a country divided on fundamental economic issues.

What is certain is the majority of Ecuadorians think that, wheelchair or not, Lenín Moreno is the best man for the job.