Ecuador elects its next president today in the midst of the most serious security crisis in its history. Organized crime linked to drug trafficking has starred in the campaign, as a result of the country having become one of the main outlets to the Pacific for Colombian drugs managed by Mexican cartels. Since last year, a dozen politicians have been murdered, including a presidential candidate, three mayors and three mayoral candidates.
In this context, today's second round is disputed between two completely opposite options, Luisa González and Daniel Noboa, who once again reproduce the debate between supporters and detractors of the former left-wing Bolivarian president Rafael Correa, who led the country between 2007 and 2017, and who today is exiled in Belgium after receiving an eight-year prison sentence for corruption.
But, deep down, the dispute is the same one that has been replicated in Ecuador in recent years, between the oligarchic right that controlled the country since its independence and a progressivism that when it governed was not capable of carrying out the transformation that this state oil needs to lift the majority of its inhabitants out of the poverty in which more than a quarter of the population is mired. Just as an example, a quarter of children under two years of age also suffer from childhood malnutrition, according to Unicef. And to this is added the violent crisis of insecurity.
Lawyer Luisa González, a 45-year-old former Correa official, won the first round on August 20 for Revolución Ciudadana with 33.6% of the votes. Second was, with 23.4%, the businessman Daniel Noboa, 35 years old, son of the controversial banana magnate Álvaro Noboa, who was unsuccessful as a perennial presidential candidate; He is running for the right-wing National Democratic Action party.
The disparity of the polls does not allow a favorite to be declared but, if an average is taken, a close result can be predicted, with a favorable inclination for Noboa who, in addition to his votes, would also receive the support of the rest of the anti-Correísta voters.
Whoever wins, the next president will serve a strange mandate, which will not be four years, but just a year and a half, from the end of next December to May 2025, thus completing the period for which the current ruler was elected. , the conservative Guillermo Lasso. Last May, before being removed in an impeachment by parliament, the president applied for the first time in the history of Ecuador the mechanism known as “crossed death,” by dissolving the National Assembly and calling presidential and legislative elections.
The elections for the unicameral parliament, which coincided with the first round, were won by Revolución Ciudadana, although without reaching an absolute majority.
Without a doubt, the event that marked these elections was the assassination, eleven days before the first round, of the candidate Fernando Villavicencio, who became popular for his corruption complaints against Correa. On August 9, as he left a rally in Quito, Villavicencio was shot three times by a young 18-year-old Colombian hitman, who would die shortly after from police gunfire. Subsequently, six other Colombians were arrested and taken to a Guayaquil prison where on October 6 they were found hanged, as was another suspect in the crime who was murdered in a Quito prison.
Villavicencio, 59, had denounced threats from drug trafficking, which in recent years has also led to brutal riots in Ecuadorian prisons.
