The assassination of the applicant on August 9 Fernando Villavicencio, shot to death, shuffled the cards on the electoral map and left a mystery about the outcome of the elections, in which everything indicates that no one will have enough margin to avoid the ballot on October 15.
Ecuador: drug trafficking and the institutional crisis
In recent years, the country has become an operations center for foreign and local drug cartels who impose a regime of terror with killings, kidnappings and extortions.
Gangs linked to Mexican and Colombian cartels clash over the drug business and use prisons as their operations center, where bloody massacres have occurred. Since 2021, more than 430 inmates have died in those crashes.
In the streets the violence leaves a record of 26 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, almost double the previous year.
Added to the violence is a institutional crisis that has kept the country without Congress for three months, when the unpopular president William Lasso decided to dissolve it and call early elections to avoid dismissal in a political trial for corruption.
“Ecuadorians are going to vote with three feelings: fear of insecurity (…), pessimism regarding the economic situation and distrust of the political class,” Santiago Cahuasquí, a political scientist at the University of Ecuador, told AFP. SEK International.
Some 13.4 of the 18.3 million Ecuadorians must exercise the mandatory vote to elect president and vice president, as well as the 137 congressmen who will complete the current term of four years planned until May 2025.
The candidate who wins “please take care of the security of the country because there is a lot of violence,” Yolanda Cubillos told AFP in Quito.
Ecuador: the candidates for president
The face of the deceased Villavicencio, a former centrist journalist who was second in the polls before his murder, will appear on the ballot papers along with seven other candidates, since they were already printed when he was shot by a Colombian hitman.
He is replaced in the candidacy by the journalist Christian Zurita, his best friend also threatened and partner in investigations that stripped big corruption scandals. One of them led to the sentence of former socialist president Rafael Correa (2007-2017) to eight years in prison.
In the antipodes he disputes the presidency Louise Gonzalez, 45 years old, Correa’s dolphin and the only female candidate.
The assassination “exacerbated the anticorreista sentiment” represented by the deceased candidate, Cahuasquí points out.
The economic and social situation of Ecuador
struck by the poverty (27%) in a dollarized economy, with a quarter of the population in informal job or unemployedEcuador will experience rarefied elections due to a state of exception that seeks to curb violence.
The ecuadorians They will also vote on a historic referendum to stop the exploitation of crude oil in a part of the Yasuní Amazon National Park, as the world seeks to reduce fossil fuels and mitigate global warming.
Whoever wins will have to face political instability and the rise of violence fueled by drug trafficking, which has changed the face of a country that until recently was the most peaceful in Latin America.
The elections will put an end to the mandate of Lasso, who has not had majority support either in the Assembly or on the street (it must be remembered that he dissolved the Chamber when he was preparing to vote on his dismissal), but it is not likely that they will bring greater stability policy. And it is that the new president or president will only hold the position between November of this year and May 2025, when the mandate is completed and elections must be called again.
Source: Ambito
