Image by Planet Volumes.
Voting took place on February 9 for Ecuador’s next president. With 96% of the votes counted, Ecuador’s National Electoral Council indicated incumbent President Daniel Noboa of the National Alliance Party (ADN) had taken 44.2% of the vote and Luisa González of the Citizen’s Revolution Party, 43.9%. Second-round voting for these two candidates takes place on April 13. The elected president will serve from 2025 until 2029.
Noboa was elected in October 2023 to complete the presidential term of Guillermo Lasso, a banker who resigned to avoid accountability on bribery charges. Noboa’s backers created the ADN Party specifically for that election. González, runner-up then, served for nine years in the administration of progressive President Rafael Correa (2007-2017).
Leónidas Iza, leader of the indigenous Pachakutik party, received a surprising 5.29% of the vote; 14 other candidates shared the remainder . Some 83.4% of those eligible did vote. Pre-election opinion surveys varied widely; most favored Noboa.
Ecuadorians voted for 151 members of the country’s unicameral National Assembly. With more than 70% of the votes counted, the Citizens Revolution Party (CR) and ADN Party of Daniel Noboa claimed 67 and 66 seats, respectively,. Comparable results in 2023 showed 52 RC delegates, the largest group, and 14 ADN delegates.
Noboa’s billionaire father controls a business network of 150 subsidiaries, is by far the country’s biggest banana exporter, and five times was an unsuccessful presidential candidate. Miami-born Daniel Noboa, formerly a National Assembly deputy, graduated from New York University and obtained graduate degrees from Harvard’s Kennedy School, Northwestern University, and George Washington University.
Second place finisher Luisa González, a lawyer, based her campaign and the earlier one against Noboa on the program offered by the Rafael Correa administration. It expanded healthcare and access to education, reduced poverty, and advanced measures protecting the environment and distancing the economy from neoliberalism. González took criticism for her affiliation with Correa. Widely regarded as a victim of lawfare, the former president was convicted of corruption and lives in Belgium.
Naboa’s campaign had trouble defending an illegal police raid in early 2024 on Mexico’s embassy where Correa-era Vice President Jorge Glas, accused of corruption, had sought refuge. He was seized and remains in prison. Mexico broke off diplomatic relations.
On February 3, the Constitutional Court invalidated Noboa’s attempt to appoint an interim vice president rather than Vice President Verónica Abad to perform presidential duties while he was campaigning, as required by law. He and Abad are political enemies.
The candidates competed in an atmosphere of overwhelming chaos. The background is of economic stress in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and reduced support for social programs from loss of oil export income, due to falling prices. Ecuador has become an illicit drug emporium for U.S. and European buyers, with considerable storage, transit, and export capabilities.
Organized crime and gangs with ties to drug cartels have mushroomed. Ecuador’s murder rate, low during Correa’s presidency, is high now. Turmoil and killings have spread throughout overcrowded prisons. Neither candidate offered responses to the crisis that would differentiate one from the other. Supporting military and police power, each campaign aligned with a so-called war on terrorism.
Ecuador’s military over decades has prominently inserted itself into the conduct of domestic affairs. What with his family’s linkage with Ecuador’s wealthy and powerful, Nobia presumably joins with that sector in seeking military protection for the land, plantations, mines, and commercial relationships they control.
Neighboring Colombia may well serve as precedent. The juxtaposition there of narcotrafficking and domestic turmoil that was pervasive and violent impelled those in charge to expand the security state and seek U.S. assistance. Ever willing, Washington officials devised Plan Colombia.
The process is hardly to be ignored in Ecuador. To the extent she is unenthusiastic about U.S. intervention, candidate Gonzalez would be at odds with Noboa. She may indeed have reservations, based on affinity with a Correa government that with other left-leaning regional leaders stood up against U.S. imperialism. Correa in 2008 expelled the U.S. military from Ecuador’s Manta airbase. Campaigning in 2023, Gonzalez associated U.S. use of the Manta base with the country’s high murder rate.
Naboa is different, not least on account of his personal U.S. connections. A series of agreements in 2023 between the United States and former President Guillermo Lasso, whom Naboa replaced as president, allowed for U.S. military activities within Ecuador. Naboa himself signed a concluding agreement in early 2024. Former head of the U.S. Southern Command General Laura Richardson visited Ecuador during his tenure.
In early December 2024, the Noboa government announced that the U.S. military would establish a base in the Galápagos Islands, in violation of Ecuador’s Constitution. U.S. naval ships had conducted mapping and monitoring exercises there in 1919; two year later the Galápagos came under administrative control of the U.S. agency operating the Panama Canal. U.S. troops occupied the Galápagos during World War II.
As González faces a second round of voting, some voters presumably do not favor U.S. military intervention. But political leaders of all stripes and the many living in precarious and threatening circumstances may be reluctant to say no. González’s position on the issue, ill-defined as it is, may give the upper hand to Noboa. The U.S. government is surely paying attention.
