GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador — Ecuador’s presidential election Sunday is shaping up to be a repeat of the 2023 race, when voters chose a young, conservative millionaire over the leftist protégée of the country’s most influential president this century.
President Daniel Noboa and Luisa González are the clear front-runners among the pool of 16 candidates. All have promised voters to reduce the widespread crime that pushed their lives into an unnerving new normal four years ago.
The spike in violence across the South American country is tied to the trafficking of cocaine produced in neighboring Colombia and Peru. So many voters have become crime victims that their personal and collective losses will be a determining factor in deciding whether a third president in four years can turn Ecuador around or if Noboa deserves more time in office.
Voting is mandatory in Ecuador. In the port city of Guayaquil, people lined up under a light rain outside a public university where tens of thousands were expected to cast ballots.
Crime, gangs and extortion
“For me, this president is disastrous,” said Marta Barres, 35, who went to the voting center with her three teenage children. “Can he change things in four more years? No. He hasn’t done anything.”
Barres, who must pay $25 a month to a local gang to avoid harassment or worse, said she would vote for González because she believes she can reduce crime across the board and improve the economy.
More than 13.7 million people are eligible to vote. To win outright, a candidate needs 50% of the vote or at least 40% with a 10-point lead over the closest challenger. If needed, a runoff election would take place on April 13.
Noboa defeated González in the October 2023 runoff of a snap election that was triggered by the decision of then-President Guillermo Lasso to dissolve the National Assembly and shorten his own mandate as a result. Noboa and González, a mentee of former President Rafael Correa, had only served short stints as lawmakers before launching their 2023 presidential campaigns.
Testing the limits of laws and norms of governing
Noboa, 37, is an heir to a fortune built on the banana trade. He opened an event organizing company when he was 18 and then joined his father’s Noboa Corp., where he held management positions in the shipping, logistics and commercial areas. His political career began in 2021, when he won a seat in the National Assembly and chaired its Economic Development Commission.
Under his presidency, the homicide rate dropped from 46.18 per 100,000 people in 2023 to 38.76 per 100,000 people last year. Still, it remained far higher than the 6.85 per 100,000 people in 2019, and some of Noboa’s no-holds-barred crimefighting strategies have come under scrutiny inside and outside the country for testing the limits of laws and norms of governing.
His questioned tactics include the state of internal armed conflict he declared in January 2024 in order to mobilize the military in places where organized crime has taken hold, as well as last year’s approval of a police raid on Mexico’s embassy in the capital, Quito, to arrest former Vice President Jorge Glas, a convicted criminal and fugitive who had been living there for months.
His head-on approach, however, is also earning him votes.
“My vote was for Noboa because of his skills and because he maintains a direct confrontation with the armed drug-trafficking groups and the corrupt,” Pablo Votruba, a retired doctor in Quito, said.
‘Things are not going to change’
González, 47, held various government jobs during the presidency of Correa, who led Ecuador from 2007 through 2017 with free-spending socially conservative policies and grew increasingly authoritarian in his last years as president. He was sentenced to prison in absentia in 2020 in a corruption scandal.
González was a lawmaker from 2021 until May 2023, when Lasso dissolved the National Assembly. She was unknown to most voters until Correa’s party picked her as its presidential candidate for the snap election.
Waiting for her turn to vote, architecture student Keila Torres said she had not yet decided who to vote for. None, she said, will be able to lower crime across Ecuador due to deep-rooted government corruption.
“If I could, I wouldn’t be here,” said Torres, who has witnessed three robberies in public buses over the past four years and barely escaped a carjacking in December. “Things are not going to change.”
Torres added that criminal activity has affected her studies as her neighborhood’s gang targets anyone walking the streets past 10 p.m., which forced her to skip night classes to not miss curfew. She said her family is not forced to pay monthly extortion fees to the gang, but the group did urge neighbors to vote for a specific candidate.
“In my area, they left fliers in every house door saying that if they didn’t vote for Luisa, they would have to face the consequences,” Torres said.
The Associated Press
The Associated Press
