Ecuadorian elections (referendum, 21 April 2024)

[Peeperkorn]

* Christian Zurita voted in a school in northern Quito protected by a police and military escort, the first time such measure is required for a presidential candidate.

https://twitter.com/yali_loaiza/status/1693289713979760646

Dukakis vibes.

[Peeperkorn]

who would be favored in a Gonzalez v Noboa run off?

Noboa IMO, though the final margin in this round may be interesting in that regard. What unites him, Topic, and to a lesser extent Zurita is that their vote totals have all dramatically increased since the assassinations. That suggests voters went to all of them for the same reasons, albeit with different initial conclusions. One would expect consolidation in a runoff.

Also apparently there was a conspiracy theory that Gonzalez had something to do with the assassination.

Gotta say, if i had to bet a candidate was behind it, it would be Topic - shady paramilitary guy tied to mafia party who gained in the polls after his assassination?

This is becoming totally insane.

Christian Zurita has just posted this on his Twitter account:

I share something that I cannot disregard: several months ago, my friend Fernando Villavicencio filed a complaint about a possible contract-killing-type attack. The surprise? He signaled assemblymen from the RC5 and PSC as the supposed ones implicated. Let’s share to be vigilant.

According to Zurita, Villavicencio formally requested in last April the Fiscalía to investigate a potential plan to assassinate him by hitmen, a plan he had been informed by unnamed legislators (Zurita says they wanted to remain anonymous, presumably because of fear of retaliation). The complaint of Villavicencio mentioned the names of five legislators who, allegedly, discussed the assassination plan:

- Pablo Muentes (PSC-Guayas)
- Ronny Aleaga (RC-Guayas)
- Roberto Cuero (RC-Guayas)
- Ronal González (RC-Los Ríos)
- Walter Gómez (RC-Guayas)

All but Aleaga and Gómez are seeking reelection.

Everyone of course will have their own "hunch" but this is the formal accusation by Zurita against (mostly) RC.

RC is González right?

Yes.

[Peeperkorn]

Thanks for your posts "Sir John Johns". Way better than anything that could be found in the Ecuadorian press.

[Peeperkorn]

The cartoon is a parody of the Doraemon anime (which appears to be quite popular in Ecuador while this one has never been a thing in my country, where there have still been hundreds of anime being aired since the late 1970s) with the four candidates being depicted as the four main kid characters of the anime:

This is really interesting, I didn't even know that Doraemon had been dubbed to Spanish.

[Peeperkorn]

The cartoon is a parody of the Doraemon anime (which appears to be quite popular in Ecuador while this one has never been a thing in my country, where there have still been hundreds of anime being aired since the late 1970s) with the four candidates being depicted as the four main kid characters of the anime:

This is really interesting, I didn't even know that Doraemon had been dubbed to Spanish.

Lol, everyone and their mother (quite literally) has seen it. Out of curiosity, how long have you been in the US?

Five years. As far as I know we never had Doraemon on Uruguayan TV or the Latin American international cable channels that we had. Maybe it's a Pacific coast countries thing?

[Peeperkorn]

Wiki says that the 1979 series was aired in Argentinian tv at least.

lmao, el GATO CÓSMICO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g_YYmZ8Cuc

lol @ the sign language interpreter.

[Peeperkorn]

The debate of last Sunday is widely panned as mediocre, repetitive, dull and lacking of interest and substance: ‘the debate between Luisa González and Daniel Noboa could have been an e-mail’; ‘the debate between Noboa and González was not even sufficient for memes’; ‘Televised electoral debates: little show and little substance’.

Daniel Noboa is widely seen as the main loser of the debate as he totally failed to renew his first round debate performance, delivering here monotone, scripted and repetitive interventions and not really trying to reach undecided voters nor highlighting the social and environmental aspects of his platform. The ADN candidate attacked at various occasions, and on topics barely related to the issue, the classification table introduced by the Correa government to determine the prosecution of drug users, trying to put the rise of drug trafficking and criminality on that peculiar measure, leading González to express her concern about Noboa’s apparent 'fixation' with drugs.

Noboa also committed a major mistake when González asked him about the former position of Bernardo Manzano (an agriculture minister under Lasso forced to resign due his connections with Rubén Cherrez and Danilo Carrera and his possible involvement in the León de Troya case) as a manager in the Noboa Group, not subtly hinting at the use by drug cartels of banana shipment towards Europe as a way to export cocaine outside of Ecuador. Indeed, Noboa responded with a whataboutery, mentioning accusations of ties with cartels made against José Serrano, an interior minister under Correa, hence undermining his pretenses to incarnate a new way of doing politics, above personal attacks and above the pro/anti-Correa cleavage.

By contrast, the performance of González, while still pretty mediocre, looked like by default as better than the one of Noboa and as a noticeable improvement over her own disastrous performance during the first round debate. Unlike in last August, the RC candidate appeared as more prepared, less robotic, less focused on the record of the Correa administration and stayed largely away from the usual victimhood posture.

Unlike what I wrongly thought, she didn’t engaged into nationalist rhetoric. When asked by Noboa about the reward issued by the US government for any information leading to the conviction of the assassins of Villavicencio, she perfunctorily expressed her support for it before rapidly moving away from that topic. When Noboa attacked her about the recent participation of Correa to a meeting of the Puebla Group during which was widely discussed the de-dollarization topic, González aptly answered that the Puebla Group meeting was about the de-dollarization of global trade system and not the abandonment of dollar by Ecuador and reminded Noboa about his trip in Russia as head of the economic development commission to seek an alternative payment option outside of dollar system, asking him if that was making him an opponent to dollar (relatedly, Noboa pretended then his family never exported a single box of bananas to Russia, which is certainly a blatant lie).

In her short conclusion of the debate, González included a complaint about the absence of discussion about women’s problems and delivered a message of inclusion which, while certainly hypocritical, made her conclusion much more inspirational than the one of Noboa, a totally vapid message he appears not having even anticipated.

So in short, if the debate had any impact, it would be on a tightening of the race.

I want Noboa to win, but apparently he's going to be just another mediocre president.

[Peeperkorn]

Sir John, if González wins, do you expect her to have some kind of free will or will she be just Correa's puppet?

[Peeperkorn]

It cannot be overstated how important is Correa's defeat for Latin American democracy.
I don't think that Noboa will be a successful/popular president though.