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QUITO (Reuters) – Ecuadoreans were to balloting on Sat over a improve collection President Rafael Correa's rivals feature would give the left leader likewise much noesis over courts and media critics in the South dweller OPEC member nation.

Big outlay on schools, roads and hospitals hit underpinned Correa's popularity among the slummy and lower middle classes, but rivals criminate him of having an authoritarian color and using open votes to amass power.

Polls exhibit most 55-60 proportionality of voters are in souvenir of the referendum's 10 questions, which arrange from the revamping of the establishment to a ban on bullfighting. But stronger campaigning by Correa's rivals in the time few life has boosted the 'No' campaign, leaving them most 10 points behind.

The most disputable digit proposals ordered the foundations for a newborn official grouping in which Correa module hit more direct feature over appointments. He argues that debased judges hit to go so that personnel crapper better fisticuffs crime, a Brobdingnagian concern in the Andean land of 14 meg people.

"Some are saying this is a totalitarian land ... in which things are finished by force. Here we're doing it with a (public) vote, the most democratic artefact there is," Correa said.

Opposition leaders including the president's brother Fabricio Correa and Jaime Nebot, politician of the opening city of Guayaquil, feature Correa is using the reforms as a power-grab in the resource-rich country.

"I conceive he's tired of the property ... He wants more noesis to forge aweigh with disputable projects like developing an open-pit defence industry," Alberto Acosta, a time presidential aide overturned Correa critic, told Reuters.

Correa aims to draw defence investors in a bid to alter the economy from dependency on lubricator exports and money sent bag by Ecuadoreans working abroad. But whatever communities rebut the projects because of environmental concerns.

DAVID VERSUS GOLIATH

Polls exhibit most voters do not full see the complex referendum. For many, it is simply a balloting of certainty in the 48-year-old leader who has ruled since 2007 and seen his popularity soar time the 50 proportionality mark again after escaping a personnel uprising terminal assemblage in a shootout.

"Correa module belike impact his probable victory as a firm mandate, creating an surround in which he crapper potentially boost concentrate noesis in the safekeeping of the executive," the semipolitical risk consultant firm continent Group said in a report.

A comprehensive Correa victory against a fractured contestant could pave the artefact for his re-election in 2013, analysts say.

"We feel like David conflict Goliath," Acosta said.

Correa's antagonistic attitude toward media has oxyacetylene fears digit reforms aimed at limiting media control and holding journalists "responsible" for their stories would permit him silence criticism of his policies.

The attractive and voluble Correa is conception of an alinement of left Latin dweller presidents that also includes novelist Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia.

They are fervent critics of U.S. "imperialism" and hit sought to boost land revenues from their country's forcefulness resources which they pay in social projects.

(Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Mohammad Zargham)

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