Ecuador votes this Sunday to elect its first female president or the youngest president in history in an exercise classified as close and tense after the murder of a candidate in the midst of the drug onslaught.
The day progresses calmly and will last until 5:00 p.m. local time (10:00 p.m. GMT) to choose under a mandatory vote between Luisa González, bishop of former socialist president Rafael Correa (2007-2017), and Daniel Noboa, son of one of the richest men in the country.
The candidates voted with bulletproof vests, guards with rifles and a unanimous cry: stop the violence.
“Today we won!” Noboa, 35, said with his fist raised, after voting in the coastal town of Olón (southwest), where he lives.
Earlier, González appeared confident in the small coastal town of Canuto (southwest), where she voted: “The hunch is that Ecuador triumphs, that is, that the Citizen Revolution wins,” the Correism party.
➡️ Join the El Sol de México channel on WhatsApp so you don’t miss the most important information
In recent years, Ecuador has become a center of operations for drug cartels with international tentacles that impose a regime of terror and leave thousands dead.
Supported by right-wing forces and self-proclaimed center-left, Noboa could become the youngest president in the country’s history. On her side, the leftist González, a 45-year-old evangelical Christian, aspires to be the first woman elected to the presidency.
“I am going to vote with fear (…) What is most worrying is the issue of insecurity and crime,” Freddy Escobar, a 49-year-old popular singer in Quito, told AFP.
Some 13.4 of the 16.9 million Ecuadorians are called to the polls, in a race that several polls predict will be very close.
The first results will be announced around 6:30 p.m. local time (11:30 p.m. GMT), according to the National Electoral Council.
Some 100,000 soldiers and police are deployed throughout the country to guarantee security.
“The new president has a complicated job”
“Security, employment, health, education, I think the new president has a complicated job,” said driver Cristian Chacahuasay (27 years old). Poverty is around 27 percent in a dollarized country, while the sum of unemployment and underemployment is 26 percent.
The winner this Sunday will govern Ecuador for almost 17 months, until the presidential term of right-wing Guillermo Lasso ends, who dissolved Congress and called early elections to avoid dismissal in a political trial for corruption.
Experts consider that the new mandate will be a kind of pre-campaign for the four-year election in 2025, which will set the style of the short period.
Political violence marred the campaign with the murders of eight leaders.
Fernando Villavicencio, one of the presidential favorites for the first round on August 20, was shot as he left a rally in Quito a few days before the elections. Later, seven of the prisoners involved in his crime were murdered in different prisons.
González and Noboa committed to fighting crime and drug gangs. Between 2018 and 2022, homicides quadrupled and rose to 26 per 100,000 inhabitants. This year, experts estimate that they will rise to 40.
Gangs linked to Mexican and Colombian cartels clash over the drug business and use prisons as logistics offices, where bloody massacres have occurred. Since 2021, more than 460 inmates have died in these clashes.
Who is competing in the Ecuadorian elections?
Tattooed, athlete and animal defender, González proposes a more supportive State after the right-wing governments that followed Correa, sentenced to eight years in prison for corruption.
Although he assures that he will maintain independence, his eventual presidency symbolizes the return in person of the former president exiled in Belgium since 2017.
In the first round, González obtained 34 percent of the votes and Noboa 23 percent, but several pollsters showed a rebound for the son of the banana magnate.
Noboa aspires to fulfill the frustrated dream of his father, who ran for presidential elections five times without success. In 2006 he lost against Correa, who from the shadows is now a rival of his heir.
Reserved and with few smiles, the young candidate tiptoed into the runoff being almost unknown in politics. Very active on social networks, Noboa proposes to boost the economy, with credit facilities for small and medium-sized businesses.
➡️ Subscribe to our Newsletter and receive the most relevant notes in your email
His most famous proposal was to create prison ships to isolate prisoners from “the non-violent” and their criminal networks.
Without an absolute majority in Congress, any of the candidates will face difficulties in making their reforms a reality.
2023-10-15 19:19:01
#Elections #Ecuador #president #elected #drug #violence #Sol #México
