2023-10-16 00:57:23
Ecuador ended a smooth election day this Sunday to elect its first female president or the youngest president in its history, with the challenge of confronting the growing violence linked to drug trafficking.
Car horns in the streets accompanied the end of voting at 5:00 p.m. local (10:00 p.m. GMT) to choose between Luisa González, bishop of former socialist president Rafael Correa (2007-2017), and Daniel Noboa, son of one of the richest men. from the country.
The candidates voted with bulletproof vests, guards with rifles and a unanimous cry: stop violence in the country of 16.9 million inhabitants.
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.
The National Electoral Council (CNE) indicated that participation was around 82.33% of the 13.4 million Ecuadorians who were called to exercise the mandatory vote.
In the middle of the day, allegations of fraud arose after images of a person filling out ballots in favor of Noboa in what appears to be a voting center circulated on social networks.
Diana Atamaint, president of the CNE, announced the “immediate” investigation of the alleged irregularity.
Supported by right-wing forces and self-proclaimed center-left, Noboa could become the youngest president in the country’s history at 35 years old.
For her part, 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.
The first results will be announced around 6:30 p.m. local time (11:30 p.m. GMT), according to the CNE.
Some 100,000 military and police officers are deployed throughout the country to ensure security.
The winner will govern Ecuador for almost 17 months, until the end of the term of right-wing President Guillermo Lasso, 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.
“Today we won!” said Noboa with his fist raised after voting in Olón (southwest), the town where he lives.
González also showed confidence in the coastal Canuto (southwest), where she voted: “The hunch is that Ecuador triumphs, that is, that the Citizen Revolution wins,” the Correism party.
Political violence marred the campaign: eight political leaders were murdered.
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.
Poverty is around 27% in this dollarized country, while the sum of unemployment and underemployment is 26%.
“People of a few years old are no longer given the opportunity” to work, said the unemployed Eufemia Idrobo, 51, without revealing her vote.
Tattooed, athlete and animal rights activist, 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% of the votes and Noboa 23%, 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.
His most famous proposal was to create prison ships to isolate prisoners from their criminal networks.
Without an absolute majority in Congress, any of the candidates will face difficulties in making their reforms a reality.
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