Ecuadorian elections (referendum, 21 April 2024)

[Sir John Johns]

* The election of the parish council (junta parroquial) in Calacalí (canton of Quito), a 4,500 inhabitants rural parish, 17 kilometers north to urban Quito, will be repeated as the four lists obtained a combined 1,806 votes (46.6% of the total votes), which is less than the amount of null votes (1,882 accounting for 48.5% of total votes); blank votes account for 4.9% of the total votes. According to the Constitution, when the total of null votes are superior to the sum of the valid votes obtained by the lists or candidates running in an election, said election must be declared void and a new one should be held. This is the first time since such provision has been introduced (in 2008) that an election has to be repeated due to a number of valid votes inferior to the one of null.



* The canton of Quito should anyway return to the polls in the next months to approve or reject a proposal to ban metal mining in the six parishes (Calacalí, Gualea, Nanegal, Nanegalito, Nono, Pacto) constituting the ‘commonwealth’ (mancomunidad) of Andean Chocó, an area covering the northwest part of Quito Canton and home to a biosphere reserve and a high biodiversity: 700 bird species, 140 amphibian species, 100 mammal species (including the spectacled bear) and 46 reptile species. The CNE has indeed validated 206,517 signatures gathered by the Quito sin Minería (‘Quito Without Mining’) ecological group, more than the 197,427 required to force a consulta on the matter.



* Yet another attack against an elected official: the incumbent mayor of Camilo Ponce Enríquez (Azuay province), Baldor Bermeo, who had been defeated on 5 February when running for the Igualdad-Participa alliance by a candidate running for a MDS-UP-Moviento Alianza Ponceña Progresista, has been severely injured on 13 February by several bullet shots during an assassination attempt. Bermeo had already survived a shooting on last 14 June that left three dead and five injured. Bermeo had to be rushed to a hospital in Machala (because there is none in his 36,000-inhabitant canton) with his life in serious danger. Ponce Enríquez is the most violent canton in Azuay province (25 violent deaths registered in 2022 against 33 in Cuenca, a way more populated canton) and the main reason is: illegal mining. The attack against Bermeo in 2022 took place in one of his mines; his brother, also a miner, was murdered in 2013. Two businessmen in mining have also been assassinated last year in the canton, as part of disputes between criminal groups over control of the lucrative gold extraction.

[Sir John Johns]

The recounting operations have finally been concluded with the final results (still subject to potential challenges) in the referendum being:

Question 1 (extradition of nationals accused of crimes): Yes 48.5% No 51.5%
Question 2 (autonomy of the Fiscalía General) Yes 43.3% No 56.7%
Question 3 (reduction in number of legislators) Yes 46.9% No 53.1%
Question 4 (minimum number of members for political movements): Yes 45.4% No 54.5%
Question 5 (reducing the attributions of the CPCCS) Yes 42.4% No 57.6%
Question 6 (abolishing the direct election of the CPCCS) Yes 42.1% No 57.9%
Question 7 (water protection areas) Yes 44.6% No 55.4%
Question 8 (financial incentive for generation of environmental services) Yes 44.0% No 56.0%

In term of total (valid and invalid) votes:

Question 1 (extradition of nationals accused of crimes): Yes 35.8% No 38.0% Blank 17.6% Null 8.5%
Question 2 (autonomy of the Fiscalía General) Yes 31.3%  No 40.9% Blank 19.1% Null 8.6%
Question 3 (reduction in number of legislators) Yes 33.9% No 38.3% Blank 19.1% Null 8.7%
Question 4 (minimum number of members for political movements): Yes 32.7% No 39.3% Blank 19.3% Null 8.7%
Question 5 (reducing the attributions of the CPCCS) Yes 30.8% No 41.9% Blank 18.5% Null 8.8%
Question 6 (abolishing the direct election of the CPCCS) Yes 30.2% No 41.5% Blank 19.5% Null 8.7%
Question 7 (water protection areas) Yes 31.9% No 39.6% Blank 19.9% Null 8.6%
Question 8 (financial incentive for generation of environmental services) Yes 31.3% No 39.8% Blank 20.4% Null 8.5%

Map of the result for question 1, the one which garnered the most support (note: in Guayas, the parishes of Eloy Alfaro, Durán Canton; Tarqui, Guayaquil; and Milagro, Milagro are split in two according to the limits of the local electoral districts).



The parish where the 'yes' received the most support (91.4%) was La Puntilla (Samborondón Canton) in Guayas, a super-chic district beside the sea established in the 1990s/2000s to welcome the wealthiest (and whitest) inhabitants of Guayaquil and home to countless villas with swimming pools, gated communities, malls and the Kennedy Clinic Hospital, the private hospital where President Lasso is currently recovering after having suffered last week a broken left fibula (not a good month for him). La Puntilla has always voted for Lasso by overwhelming margins in the most recent presidential elections.

The parish where the 'yes' received the least support (2.6%) was Cochapamba (Saquisilí Canton) in Cotopaxi, a remote indigenous community in the Andean páramo where the majority of the population is still speaking Kichwa and make a living from farming and sheep-rearing. According to the 2010 census, 99.0% of the population there had unsatisfied basic needs, only 31.3% of households were served by the public water system and only 0.4% by a motorized garbage collection service. The parish has voted for the candidate supported by Pachakutik in the most recent presidential elections, even during the heyday of the Correa presidency and this is where Leonidas Iza has been formally invested as president of the CONAIE in 2021 during an indigenous traditional ceremony.

The opposition between these two parishes, ,which have very little in common, is a good summary of the results of the referendum. As a general rule, the more a parish is urbanized, affluent, white and enjoying developed and functioning public services, the more it supported the 'yes'. As a general rule, cities and towns backed the 'yes' while the rural parts of the country (bar a few exception) voted for the 'no', sometimes by very important margins. I'm not sure there is such a stark rural/urban divide existing in another Latin America where right-wing parties are usually doing okay if not great among rural voters. Here, this is a close result but what the map is showing is a series of blue spots in an ocean of red.


The 'yes' prevailed in the urban parts of Quito (with its strongest results in the wealthiest parts of the northern part of the city - 77.0% in Rumipamba, 72.4% in Iñaquito) and in the adjacent Tumbaco Valley (71.9% in Cumbaya, a very wealthy suburb; 59.2% in Conocoto, 58.2% in Nayón); in all urban parishes of Guayaquil bar Pascuales (49.4%) with weaker results in the peripheral and poorest parishes of Ximena (55.6%) and Febres Cordero (54.9%), home to numerous slums and hardly hit by criminality, in Durán (51.1% at cantonal level) and in Milagro (51.4% and 51.3% in the two urban electoral districts); in all urban parishes of Cuenca bar one (Hermano Miguel: 47.6%), all urban parishes of Loja and Ambato, all urban parishes of Riobamba bar the less urbanized one (Yaruquiez: 47.1%), in three out of five urban parishes in Ibarra and in all but one urban parishes of Azogues - each times contrasting with the rural, more indigenous, periphery which went for the 'no'. The same in Carchi where only Tulcán, the main city, supported the 'yes', in Zamora Chinchipe where only the capital, Zamora didn't vote for the 'no'. Other urban areas having voted for the 'yes' are including Esmeraldas (57.5% at cantonal level), Babahoyo (54.8% at cantonal level), Santo Domingo (53.1% at cantonal level) and parts of Portoviejo, Salinas and Quevedo which however went for the 'no' at cantonal level (respectively 45.9%, 47.9% and 49.9%). By contrast, the 'no' swept all urban parishes in Manta (42.9% for the 'yes' at cantonal level), Machala (47.4% at cantonal level) and all urban parishes in Latacunga bar La Matriz (61.0% for the 'yes') where is located the city's colonial cathedral.

Among the very few rural areas where the 'yes' prevailed are the mining area in southeast El Oro, around Zaruma (61.5%), Portovelo (52.6%), Paccha (58.7%) and Piñas (59.0%) which voted for Hervas in the 2021 presidential first round, the canton of El Carmen in northeast Manabí (50.4% at cantonal level) which is usually voting for CREO even if I don't really know why), the rural hinterland of Esmeraldas City, the Santiago River Valley in Esmeraldas , the surrounds of Ambato and the mestizo-populated parts of Tungurahua province as well as Penipe Canton in northeast Chimborazo; finally the Galápagos archipelago. Also voting for the 'yes', various small towns like Gonzanama (57.5%) and Cariamanga (53.8%) in Loja, Gualaceo (51.0%) in Azuay, Vinces (54.5%) in Los Ríos, San José de Chimbo (53.1%) in Bolívar or Puyo (54.6%) in Pastaza.


The 'no' prevailed elsewhere, including in the some of the poorest parts of the major cities (the aforementioned Pascuales in Guayaquil; the peripheral northern parishes - 51.1% in Comité del Pueblo; 51.6% in El Condado - and southern parishes - 58.4% in Argelia, 59.3% in Guamani, 59.6% in Turubamba). The strongest results for the 'no' largely match the distribution of the indigenous communities with northeast Pichincha around Cayambe, the Saraguro-populated area covering northern Loja-northwest Zamora Chinchipe and a diagonal between northern Cotopaxi and southeast Chimborazo being especially noticeable on the map.

[Sir John Johns]

An article about the recent Ecuadorian elections published and translated into English on the website of a Paraguayan political magazine and written by Juan Francisco Camino, an Ecuadorian political scientist.

In addition to emphasize the victory of the Citizen Revolution in the local elections, Camino is drawing a second lesson from the election:

The results also allow us to affirm that, on the side of the executive, one of the most important reasons for its defeat has been the absence of the State. In two years of government, the Ecuadorian state has shown itself incapable of providing basic public services to citizens, which has translated into problems of insecurity, lack of access to medicines, abuses in labor relations and educational infrastructure.

The absence of the State has also been reflected in the very low budget execution. According to the Fundación Ciudadanía y Desarrollo, most of the ministries reached 30% of budget execution as of the first semester of 2022. This showed a weakening of public services, which in turn has had an impact on how citizens perceive the State. It seems that the national government, advised by libertarians* in favor of a minimal State, did not understand that the Ecuadorian reality demands a present State, which provides public services for the poorest sectors, since an Ecuadorian with an average income (200 dollars per month) needs public health, education, and security, to at least survive every day.

But this election also leaves some lessons for the rest of the political organizations. The null vote has been significant and is a symptom of the wear and tear of the political system. For example, in the province of Pichincha, this option reached 17.98% of the votes and surpassed the candidate who reached third place (15.76% of the valid votes). For the mayoralty of Quito, on the other hand, the null vote reached 13.76%, surpassing 8 mayoral candidates. For the mayoralty of Guayaquil, the null vote reached 10.68%, being the fourth option among the voters of this canton. The massive nullification of the vote should call the attention of all political organizations in the country, as it could later translate into an “Out with All”, something that Ecuador already experienced between 2005 and 2006, and which is currently present in Peru.

* The mentioned libertarian advisers are the members of the Ecuador Libre think tank, founded by Guillermo Lasso himself, and whose head, Aparicio Caicedo, was a key presidential adviser until his recent resignation, in the wake of the referendum defeat. Caicedo has been in recent months at the center of various controversies over his interference in the appointments of key officials and his name is now mentioned in the El Gran Padrino case involving Danilo Carrera and Rubén Cherres.



Meanwhile, a field reporting from Primicias in Calacalí is giving indications on why the null vote prevailed there in the election of the parish council. Firstly, a campaign for null vote has been initiated by a local activist to protest the disqualification of two lists (PSE and SUMA) by the CNE. Secondly, several voters who had cast a null vote are giving additional reasons to explain this move, reasons that should be connected to Camino's article:

She explains that, out of the candidates there were, she barely knew the one running for reelection: Eduardo Logaña, of the Democratic Left (ID) party. ‘He did nothing for the barrios’ Seminario blurts out with much indignation.

‘The others only appear during the campaign. These are persons who have done nothing for the village’ emphasizes the inhabitant who reminds the problems faced by Calacalí.

1 The frequent interruptions in water in water supply. ‘They provide us with the service between five a.m. and eight a.m. and then they take it away from us for the whole day’ she says.

2 The pollution from the factories in the surroundings. ‘The odors are very strong, but no one does anything about it’ she affirms.

In the Magdalena barrio, Jacqueline C., 54, laments the unresolved problems in Calacalí are tarnishing the touristic sector.

She cast a null vote. And says that the current parish council hasn’t worked for them. That there are projects that have not been completed and, additionally, there is no water and the local roads haven’t been maintained.

But that’s not all. The school in the village isn’t in a good state.

Indeed, as acknowledged by a member of the outgoing parish council, there is a hole in the roof of the school that haven’t been repaired due to a ‘missing’ revenue that should have been provided by the parish’s slaughterhouse.

[Sir John Johns]

Seems everything is heading towards a premature end of the Lasso presidency, the question being now how this will happen

https://twitter.com/wambraEc/status/1629316049949667329

The CONAIE is announcing resolutions:
- breaking the agreement with the government
- demanding the resignation of Guillermo Lasso for the Gran Padrino corruption case
- demanding the National Assembly the political trial [impeachment] of Lasso
- mobilization on 8 March to join the march for Women’s Day and the one of 28 March [to support the submission to the National Assembly of a bill on water resources].

The CONAIE is hence withdrawing from the dialogue process engaged with the government since last July, is demanding the resignation of Lasso or his ‘political trial’ by the National Assembly and has also warned the president it would declare a national strike and levantamiento in case the president ‘intends to dissolve the state functions and govern by decree (i.e. trigger a muerte cruzada).

The determination of the indigenous movement will be certainly fostered by the murder by hitmen, yesterday, in the Amazon province of Sucumbíos of Eduardo Mendúa.

https://twitter.com/confeniae1/status/1630012213200056321

The responsible for international relations in the CONAIE, Mendúa was a leader of the A’i Cofán, an indigenous nationality in the Amazon northeast whose history is absolutely depressing: deadly diseases bring by colonizers; slavery during the rubber boom in the 1900s; social and cultural disruption due to Christian missionaries (especially the evangelical ones); expropriation of lands by white/mestizo settlers since the 1970s; conflicts with illegal and criminal groups operating on the border with Colombia; and finally opposition to oil extraction in their lands, from which they have benefited little, if at all, while facing the environmental devastation provoked by repeated oil spills, leading to a legal dispute before Ecuadorian, US and international courts against Chevron to pay compensations for the dumping of oil waste in indigenous territory.

Mendúa was leading the local opposition in Dureno (Sucumbíos) against plans by Petroecuador to develop oil extraction projects in the area, hence why the CONAIE is blaming Petroecuador and the Lasso government for the murder of Mendúa. On a side note, oil exploitation in Ecuadorian Amazon is currently temporarily suspended after the collapse of a bridge on 22 February, the consequence of a phenomenon of regressive erosion that is putting the country’s main pipeline at risk.


Nevertheless, a political trial of Lasso, as demanded by the CONAIE, will not be that easy to obtain. Unlike a parliament-initiated muerte cruzada which must be justified by an ‘acute political crisis or internal commotion’, proceedings for a political trial (juicio político) of the president could only be started for three reasons (crimes against the security of the state; crimes against humanity; bribery, embezzlement or illicit enrichment), should received the support of at least 46 legislators and be sent to the Constitutional Court for being reviewed. If qualified by the Constitutional Court (independently of the status of the judicial proceedings in case of bribery, embezzlement or illicit enrichment), the impeachment motion is going before the National Assembly plenary to be approve by a two-third majority (92) of legislators and, if passed, unlike in the case of a muerte cruzada, there is no early elections as then the vice president is assuming the duties of president until the end of the term in office. A muerte cruzada triggered by the National Assembly seems to have discarded over a constitutional uncertainty about the possibility to trigger it more than once in a legislative term (it has only been triggered by the parliament in June 2022 and failed).

Additional problems connected to the choice by the parliamentary opposition for a political trial to remove Lasso.


Firstly, there is no guarantee that the motive to impeach Lasso (accusations of financing of his 2021 presidential campaign by individuals connected to the Albanian mafia will be qualified by the Constitutional Court. And, because Ecuadorian political class is the worst, the RC is also facing similar allegations about the possible financing of Arauz’s 2021 presidential campaign by individuals suspected of being connected to drug trafficking:

https://twitter.com/lahistoriaec/status/1628920269447331840

God bless you, Leonardo. The Correísta assemblywoman Patricia Núñez emotionally expressed her gratitude during the presidential second round for the support received from Leonardo Cortázar, involved in the El Padrino case. Now Núñez criticizes Cortázar and mentions dirty money in the campaign of Lasso.

Leonardo Cortázar is a businessman and political operative recorded in the audios leaked by La Posta discussing with Rubén Cherres about shady businesses in electricity sector, as part of the corruption network headed by Danilo Carrera ('El Gran Padrino'). Cortázar can be heard mentioning the fact his career as ‘manager’ of contracts in the public electricity sector started under the presidency of Correa and reached its apex under Lenín Moreno. Indeed, Cortázar served as the director of the Guayas branch of Libertad es Pueblo, a party led by one of the brothers of Moreno. He is additionally accused of being an associate of Xavier Jordán, a businessman prosecuted over his alleged participation in a corruption scheme in the procurement of medical devices to public hospitals who has fled Ecuador to live in Florida. Jordán is additionally suspected of having served as a front man to Leandro Norero and engaged into the laundering of money coming from drug trafficking.

The recent revelations are exposing the presumed role played by Cortázar and his (unregistered) political movement (National Democratic Action, ADN) in the campaigns of Andrés Arauz (through the distribution of toys and COVID kits) and Ronny Aleaga, a RC assemblyman. This one has already been involved in controversies over his alleged ties with Cortázar (which Aleaga dismissed as a ‘bad coincidence’ and lies coming from a ‘presumptuous’ and ‘braggart’ to exaggerate his political influence) after the publication in last May of an early 2022 party held in the Miami villa of Jordán where Aleaga can be seen in a swimming pool next to Cortázar and Jordán and the leaking in last January on an audio in which Cortázar is mentioning that ‘Aleaga is an operative of mine’.


Secondly, if Lasso is feeling he is losing the game in the National Assembly, he can decided to go for a muerte cruzada, having by this point nothing to lose. Hence, the threat of the CONAIE.


Thirdly, in case the impeachment of Lasso succeeded, the presidency would end in the hands of the vice president, Alfredo Borrero, a political light-weight with not much experience nor following, who will have even less legitimacy and latitude to govern than Lasso. Quite hard to see him remaining in office until 2025, especially as he hasn’t distanced himself from the president nor gave indication he would implement different policies. So, unless Borrero graciously resign, the opposition will have to find a way to also remove him from office.

[Sir John Johns]

Seems everything is heading towards a premature end of the Lasso presidency, the question being now how this will happen

Hmm, I initially thought the reaction to the election was extreme. Is it certain that Lasso doesn't make it to the next election? It looks a little like the CONAIE are overextending.

It looks like investors are seeing this quite badly. Ecuador's dollar bonds have tanked from 55 cents on the dollar to 35 cents on the dollar - the expectation is certain default! So much for that restructuring. Zero faith.

Of course nothing is never 100% certain in Ecuadorian politics but Lasso has lost so much political capital it is hard to see how he could remain in office for much long. The situation is that he has been disavowed by voters when losing a referendum seen as unlosable (at least the question about extradition) and is now facing allegations of connections with criminal organizations his administration is struggling to counter in an effective and convincing way. Additionally, his party is in absolute shambles and any attempt to relaunch his government or change his policies can only be met with skepticism as his less than two years in office have mostly demonstrated that the Lasso administration has been impotent and unable to deliver its promises while additionally being hurt by a catastrophic communication. Finally, there are growing speculations (which are only speculations) on Lasso’s health, as the president has already underwent spinal cord surgery in 2018 and 2021, has been treated for a melanoma in 2022 and has suffered a fibula fracture few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, the opposition, which is already controlling the legislature, has gained in last month election a full control on the new CPCCS (which should be led by an alliance between the RC and the PSC), the most populous provinces and the main cities of the country (it should be mentioned here that back in 2019 the Moreno administration fled to Guayaquil when Quito was paralyzed by the indigenous protests, a move which would be more difficult as now Guayaquil will be headed by an unfriendly RC municipality) while the indigenous movement has emerged strengthened from the local elections: indeed, the strong result of Churuchumbi (25.6%) in the race for prefect of Pichincha combined to the easy reelection of Caizabanda as the PK prefect of Tungurahua and the victory of the indigenous PK candidate in the race for mayor of Ambato are pretty strong indications that the unpopularity of the 2019 and 2022 indigenous paros among urban voters has probably been largely exaggerated by the medias and the political class (the under-performance of Andrés Páez is another indication of such situation).


The threat of an impending removal of Lasso has been nevertheless considered as sufficiently serious to push the so-called ‘Democratic Initiative of Spain and Americas’ to issue a statement calling for the respect of the term period of Lasso, a declaration signed by numerous right-wing and right-leaning former heads of state and government in Latin America and Spain (the inclusion of the names of Jamil Mahuad and Lenín Moreno on it is probably not a good idea, however, and this is just for the former presidents of Ecuador):

https://twitter.com/IvanDuque/status/1631274974332833793

Obviously, investors are seeing this negatively because there is considerable uncertainty about how the ousting of Lasso will happen, how much time it will take and what will follow next; and even a scenario in which Lasso manage to complete his term in office may not be as good for investors as it may sound: either he capitulate and satisfy the demands of the opposition (hence he is just a lame duck president in the two next years), either he trigger a muerte cruzada, forcing new elections (with its share of incertitude) he somehow manage to win (not the most likely outcome), only to be able to govern until the next elections in 2025, so...


The impeachment process (juicio político) of President Lasso is already on track: the special parliamentary commission investigating the Caso Encuentro (the role of Danilo Carrera in the distribution of public contracts by the Lasso government, conveniently conflated with the recent revelations on the presumed financing of the 2021 campaign by a shady Albanian businessman) has concluded its report, which is recommending the impeachment of Lasso for ‘crimes against the security of the state’ and ‘crimes against the public administration’ (the charge of ‘betrayal of the homeland’ having been ultimately dropped at the request of the PSC). The report should be now approved today by the National Assembly plenary (it needs 70 votes), opening the way for a petition demanding the impeachment of the president which must be endorsed by one-third (46 votes) of the legislators. If passed, the petition and the charges filled against the president must be reviewed under three days by the CAL (the presidium of the National Assembly) before being sent to the Constitutional Court (CC). The latter should examining the constitutionality and legality of the impeachment request and the charges filled against the president. In case the impeachment request is declared conformed to the constitution by the CC, it is returning before the CAL to be sent to the National Assembly’s Oversight Commission (currently chaired by Fernando Villavicencio, an ally of Lasso, even if not totally reliable) which issued a report under thirty days to recommend or not the impeachment of the president. In case the impeachment request is greenlighted by the Oversight Commission, it is submitted to a vote in a plenum session of the National Assembly with the impeachment needing a two-thirds majority (92 votes) to be approved.

As we can see, this is a pretty complicated and lengthy process (as provided by the 2008 Constitution to prevent a repeat of what happened in the late 1990s/early 2000s with three presidents being ousted from office by the parliament) with a lot of uncertainty for two stages of the process: the Constitutional Court and the final vote in the plenum session as it is for now unclear if the 92 votes could be reached.

There has been a lot of criticisms made by various jurists against the report issued by the commission on the Caso Encuentro (on which the impeachment of Lasso will be based on) considered as poorly written, as being of a dubious legality and for including ‘proofs’ against Lasso that turned out to be false (a tweet attributed to Leonardo Cortázar which turned out having been posted by a fake account. When serious journalism is meeting serious politics):

https://twitter.com/KarolNorona/status/1631357693431537683

But there are two rationals conflicting here: the legal one, under which an impeachment of Lasso shouldn’t happened, at least not under its current form, because it is plagued with irregularities and judicial aberrations; the political one, under which Lasso has lost the confidence of the voters and is largely unable to govern. This is the rational followed by Mireya Pazmiño, an assemblywoman (elected for Pachakutik now an independent close to Correísmo) who candidly said two days ago that if the impeachment proceedings failed, then Lasso could be removed through other means, mentioning a removal on the grounds of ‘mental incapacity’ (used in 1997 to remove President Bucaram, but the process is now much more complicated and needs, unlike in 1997, a medical examination – removal for incapacity can also been for ‘physical incapacity’ which sounds as more appropriate for the case of Lasso) or an ousting ‘by the streets’.

Of course, if we are following Pazmiño’s argumentation, Ecuador will go back to the 1990s when the legislature removed unpopular heads of state for frivolous legal motives and through largely unconstitutional proceedings. A double-edged sword (if this is used now against Lasso, this could be also used against future presidents, including RC or Pachakutik ones) and a serious blow against Correa and his 2008 Constitution which dramatically restricted the ability of the legislature to remove the head of state precisely to avoid a return to the pre-2007 situation.

[Sir John Johns]

https://twitter.com/FerminVaca/status/1632111763205308420

With 104 votes the Assembly approved the report on the Caso Encuentro. It decided to charge Lasso with the ‘commission by omission’ of various crimes. The procedure for a juicio político will be proposed by the UNES and shall be qualified by the CAL.

The resolution is revealing the votes that would eventually be expressed against Lasso in case the Constitutional Court green-lights the juicio político. 92 votes are needed to remove the president.

The report on the Caso Encuentro and recommending the impeachment of Lasso has been approved by a large majority with 104 assemblymen voting in favor (RC, PSC, Pachakutik, ID), 18 voting against (all belonging to CREO or minor parties like Avanza or Construye) and 3 abstaining (Fernando Villavicencio, Mariano Curicama and Marcos Molina Jurado, an ID assemblyman). 12 assemblymen were absent. The charge filed against Lasso will be a ‘commission by omission’ for having let the police investigation on the drug-trafficking-related business of the Albanian, Rubén Cherrez and Danilo Carrera (‘León de Troya’ case) being closed. The report has established that Lasso had been aware of the existence of the investigation since at least July 2021 even there is no proof he had ordered the dropping of the case.

The report has hence been approved in spite of previous demands from various ID and Pachakutik assemblymen to extend it to the alleged campaign financing of various politicians, in first place Andrés Arauz, by drug cartels. In the debate over the approval of the report, Pachakutik assemblyman Ricardo Vanegas claimed that the commission has deliberately neglected information coming from the Superintendency for Companies about Ecuadorian businesses controlled by the Albanian mafia in the coastal provinces and suspected of having ties with politicians from the RC, the PSC, the ID and the PSP; yet, Vanegas voted to approve the report.

Not a good start for Lasso.

[Sir John Johns]

Guillermo Lasso isn’t facing a muerte cruzada (which can only be voted upon once in a legislature by the National Assembly, even if this is remaining quite unclear) but a juicio político, the latter being a proceeding that hasn’t been used against a sitting president since 1962 (when the Congress unsuccessfully attempted to remove President Arosemena Monroy for having allegedly received the Chilean president while very drunk) but has been regularly used and abused to remove ministers and high state officials. Unlike the muerte cruzada, it requires a prior approval by the Constitutional Court and, if the National Assembly found Lasso guilty of the charges filed against him by the legislature, he is, in this instance, removed and replaced by the vice president without early elections being needed to be called. The fact that no new elections will be summoned can increased the probability of the juicio político against Lasso being successful (as assemblymen are ensured to keep their seats until the end of the legislature) but this is countered by the ability of Lasso to trigger the muerte cruzada at any given time (the pretext of ‘grave political crisis and internal disturbances’ is hard to challenge these days). A juicio político can be started at any time by the National Assembly providing it obtains the support of at least 46 assemblymen, has been approved by the CAL and green-lighted by the Constitutional Court but this is a lengthy process requiring lot of time and paperwork and, at the end of this process, if the legislators vote against the removal of the charged official, no juicio político can be restarted against said official in the same case that has motivated the juicio político.

Speaking of what, the Constitutional Court has only kept a single charge against Lasso: peculado (‘graft’ defined as the illegal misuse, appropriation or diverting of public or private assets or money by public or private authorities having control over them by virtue of their position). The offense has allegedly been committed during the attribution of public contracts by the Ecuadorian Petroleum Fleet (Flopec, the public entity in charge of transporting by sea exported oil) to Amazonas Tanker, a joint venture established by the Flopec and a private company registered in Delaware. Amazonas Tanker is itself reportedly registered in the Marshall Islands. The contract with Amazonas Tanker has been terminated in February 2022 after the Comptroller-General’s Office has established the contract had been awarded irregularly and had caused a prejudice to the State worth $6.1 million, the Flopec having during several months spent more money in the renting of oil tankers to Amazonas Tanker that it generated profit.

Yet, the manager of the Flopec who decided to terminate the contract on the basis of Comptroller-General’s report was quickly sacked afterwards and the controversial contract resumed, presumably after an intervention of Hernán Luque, the then-head of the Corporation Coordinating Public Companies (EMCO), whose whereabouts are currently unknown as he has fled Ecuador in last January. Luque was a key piece in the corruption network established by Danilo Carrera, the brother-in-law of Lasso, and can be heard in the audios leaked by La Posta discussing notably with Rubén Cherrez (the businessman suspected of ties with Albanian mafia and himself a close friend of Carrera) about the irregular distribution of contracts by the Flopec.

According to the opposition assemblymen, Lasso has been about the contract with Amazonas Tanker, about the fact it was prejudicial to the state and also deliberately ignored a report from his own anti-corruption secretary over the dubious financial management practices inside the Flopec.

The Constitutional Court hence ruled that Lasso can be charged for ‘peculado’ in this specific case while rejecting charges of concusión (concussion: the abuse by elected officials or public servants of their positions to demand undue rights, benefits or salaries for themselves or a third party) in relation with the management of the EMCO by Luque and the sale of positions inside Petroecuador by two successive managers of the state oil company, all misdeeds President Lasso would have been aware and accomplice of.



The general context in Ecuador is very gloomy as southern Ecuador has been hit by an earthquake that led to the deaths of 14 on 18 March, as Manabí and Guayas have been hardly hit by floods this month and as a landslide in Alausí (Chimborazo) has led to the death 7 and the missing of about 60 persons. There is also no improvement in sight concerning the growing influence of the drug cartels and criminal organizations. Karol Noroña, a journalist investigating organized crime and the situation in prisons has been forced to leave Ecuador and relocate in an undisclosed place after precise and imminent threats have been made against her life. And Nathaly López, a director of the Teodoro Maldonado Carbo Hospital in Guayaquil, has been killed by hitmen, presumably because of her fight against corruption and misappropriation of medical supplies in the hospital.

[Sir John Johns]

Hi. Sorry for the lack of updates in the last weeks. Currently struggling with various problems including my old computer that is regularly freezing.

Guillermo Lasso’s decision to trigger the muerte cruzada happened just after the government had scored a spectacular debacle during the renewal of the CAL (Council of the Legislative Administration, the presidium of the National Assembly) for the 2023-25 period on last Sunday.

Lasso and Henry Cucalón, a former rising star of the PSC who is serving as the minister for government since last February, have displayed a lot of efforts to enlarge the pro-government coalition in the house by generating defections in the PSC bench (which has saw four legislators deciding to leave to sit as independents the last month), trying to exploit the divisions in Pachakutik (after the disputed election as new national coordinator of Guillermo Churuchumbi, a close ally of Iza, with only about 37% of the delegates in a congress marked by allegations of frauds and irregularities) and by buying parliamentary votes with the distributions of government and public jobs (namely the appointment of the ID ‘elder statesman’ Paco Moncayo and of the leader of RETO Paul Carrasco to government posts plus the embarrassing leaking by La Posta of the audio in which Cecilia Velasque, the outgoing sub-coordinator of Pachakutik and the main opponent to Churuchumbi in the race of the indigenous party leadership, can be hearded being engaged into negotiations over public posts with the previous minister for government).

Nevertheless, the candidate for president of the National Assembly supported by the UNES, the PSC and the pro-Iza faction of Pachakutik, Virgilio Saquicela (ex-Pachakutik, ex-CREO, ex-MDS, now an independent close to the Correístas) has been handily reelected to the presidency of the legislature with 96 votes in favor, only 23 votes against and 17 abstentions when the Lasso government pretended being able to deny him a new term at the head of the National Assembly.

Furthermore, the representatives of the pro-Lasso bench (recently renamed as ‘Bancada Ecuador’) were fully ejected from the CAL as Marcela Holguín (UNES) was reelected first vice-president and Esteban Torres (PSC) elected second vice-president. The remaining of the new CAL was made up by Viviana Veloz (UNES), Ángel Maita (Pachakutik), Jorge Abedrabbo (PSC) and Yeseña Guamaní (ID) – Guamaní, of the let’s-them-eat-national-sponge-cake-day-proclamation fame, returned as a CAL member with the support of the same coalition that removed her from the second vice presidency a year ago. All candidates of the UNES-PSC-PK(Iza)-ID broad coalition all received between 94 and 100 votes when 92 votes were needed to impeach Lasso.

Neither the announcement by 11 PK assemblymen (half of the caucus) who have been absent during the vote on the new CAL that they would vote against the impeachment (somehow counterbalanced by the announcement by the coordinator of the same caucus, Salvador Quishpe, that he would voted in favor of the impeachment, after having voted against Saquicela and co in the election to renew the CAL) nor the doubts raised over the legality of the whole process (hilariously, one of the legislator who sponsored the impeachment, the ex-PK Mireya Pazmiño, is now facing accusations she has, as the chairwoman of the economic commission, approved the renewal of the controversial contract between the Flopec and the Amazonas Tankers company, hence making her suspected of having committed the exact same crime Lasso is accused of), and the possibility of a dismissal of the impeachment process by the Constitutional Court for unlawfulness were sufficient to reassure the president he could survive the impeachment.

In any case, he has clearly no majority in the parliament and is now forced to deal with the new CPCCS, at the hands of the UNES-PSC coalition, which has been sworn in on 15 May, one day after the inauguration of the mayors and prefects elected on last February.

The proclamation of the muerte cruzada has now to be examined by the Constitutional Court to determine its constitutionality as the PSC and the ID (at least its faction currently having the hand on the parliamentary group’s Twitter account) have announced they will lodge a complaint before the high court.

https://twitter.com/jaimenebotsaadi/status/1658835454748155906

https://twitter.com/BancadaID/status/1658903739053350915

The CONAIE has summoned an emergency council to collective decide what to do (probably organizing protests and blockades) in face of what it calls ‘a scenario of a Lasso dictatorship’:

https://twitter.com/CONAIE_Ecuador/status/1658815865800871936

Meanwhile, the RC, while denouncing the unconstitutionality of the muerta cruzada, is celebrating the ‘triumph’ of the impeachment proceedings and indicating it is ready to the early elections and the upcoming change it is confident (too much confident?) it will bring by winning the poll.

https://twitter.com/RC5Oficial/status/1658865447473668098

https://twitter.com/radiolacalle/status/1658899717932154882

The ex-Union for Hope bench has announced it will respected the muerte cruzada

[Sir John Johns]

Also, ten years after the collection of the signatures, the Constitutional Court has ordered on last 9 May to the CNE to finally organize a consulta on oil extraction in the Yasuní, the first ever nationwide popular initiative referendum in Ecuador which was rejected back in the days by the Correa-controlled CNE in circumstances subsequently ruled as irregular. The question will be now about the complete cessation of the ongoing oil activities in the Yasuní National Park within a year if approved by voters. The referendum is supposed to be held within 75 days after the CNE has received the notification by the court but such timetable could be disturbed by the upcoming early general elections.

https://twitter.com/Yasunidos/status/1656075690071007233

[Sir John Johns]

* The Constitutional Court has dismissed all the appeals filed to challenge the triggering of the muerte cruzada arguing it hasn’t the competence to examine whether the invocation of a motive of ‘acute political crisis and internal commotion’ used by President Lasso to trigger the muerte cruzada is legitimate. It also clarified that no other courts in the country is competent on the matter, hence preventing potential challenges by local judges like what happened in the process of removal of Llori from the presidency of the National Assembly and in the internal dispute in the Judicature Council.

Thanks to the hyper-presidentialist constitution of 2008, there is basically any legal obstacle to bar the president to dissolve the parliament while, on the contrary, any impeachment process against the head of the state needs to follow a tortuous and long path before the final parliamentary vote.


* As a consequence, the term of all legislators elected in 2021 is terminated and the country is finding itself without a parliament until the organization of new general elections. The election of national and provincial assemblymen and the presidential first round will be held, tentatively, on 20 August 2023. If required (if no candidate wins over 50% of the valid votes or has received over 40% of the valid votes and is at 10% ahead of the second most-voted candidate), the presidential runoff will be held on 15 October.

In the meantime and until the inauguration of the new authorities to complete the 2021-25 term in office (in November or December), President Lasso has full discretion to pass decrees in areas related to economic matters with only the Constitutional Court being competent to oppose the decrees, but only if it found them contrary to the constitution.

The government has already enacted an income tax reduction (to be examined by the Constitutional Court) and announced it will pass other decrees to ‘de-bureaucratize’ Ecuador. Are planned the creation of free-trade zones, the promotion of public-private partnerships, the opening of oil production to private sector, a reform of the IESS and a decree to make labor market more flexible. On the other hand, the free trade agreement recently signed with China is put on a hold as it is requiring a parliamentary approval to entry into force.

Another consequence of the dissolution of the parliament is that the state high officials couldn’t be replaced by appointees made by the new CPCCS as it also requiring a parliamentary vote.


* The big news is however that Guillermo Lasso will not running for reelection in next August, an announcement made today with the publication of an interview to the Washington Post (maybe rumors about his poor health were true). This may increase the (meager) chances of victory of a conservative candidate.

https://twitter.com/elcomerciocom/status/1659583228217286660


* Have so far officially declared their interest for running in what is already shaping as a new clown car show:

- Yaku Pérez, probably as a candidate of Democracia Sí.

- Fernando Villavicencio, who has no party to sponsor his candidacy so far, but has yet announced as possible running-mates Liliana Febres-Cordero, the daughter of the late arch-conservative president León Febres-Cordero (1984-88); current attorney-general Diana Salazar (who has immediately declined); or Patricio Carrillo, a police general who briefly served as an interior minister in 2022 before forced to resign in the wake of the María Belén Bernal case (the murder in a police school of a lawyer by her own husband, a police instructor who, benefiting from complicity into the institution, left the school premises and fled in Colombia where he was arrested three months later). Clear indications he will run on a law-and-order and anticorruption platform appealing to right-wing and far-right voters.

- Otto Sonnenholzner, a 40-year-old businessman from Guayaquil who has served as vice-president under Moreno but resigned in the middle of the pandemic, while in charge of health matters, to prepare his 2021 presidential bid which never materialized. May run for SUMA or RETO.

- Dalton Bacigalupo, an uninspiring and dull dinosaur currently serving as an ID assemblymen for Cotopaxi. This is not with him that the orange party will repeated its 2021 extraordinary result.

Rumors that Pedro Freile is interested into running (obviously not as an AMIGO candidate this time) and so are Daniel Noboa and Pedro Pablo Duart. MOVER is contemplating running Jonathan Parra, its candidate for mayor of Guayaquil in last February.

Among ‘serious’ parties, neither the RC nor Pachakutik have so far indicated a name for a potential candidate while have been mentioned as a possible CREO candidate either Juan Carlos Holguín (current foreign minister) or Henry Cucalón, (current minister for government). The PSC is pushing for another candidacy of the old leader, Jaime Nebot (already an unsuccessful candidate in 1992 and 1996 who declined to run again in 1998 and 2021), who is supposedly retired from politics.

[Sir John Johns]

* The big news is however that Guillermo Lasso will not running for reelection in next August

I suppose this makes it one of the less dishonorable departures from office as far as Ecuadorian presidents go. Somehow.

Hey, not so fast!

https://twitter.com/eluniversocom/status/1659704679511490562

The president hasn’t discarded a candidacy, sources close [to Lasso] say there has been a misunderstanding in the international interview.

From Alfonso Harb, a former legislator for the PSC and the PRIAN, a sports journalist, a businessman and a former president of the Barcelona Sporting Club who is also claiming to be a political analyst:

https://twitter.com/pochoharbEC/status/1659670626272006146

I has been able to investigate in spheres close to President Lasso and am in the informative capacity to indicate that what has been published by the Washington Post isn’t accurate. Most probably there has been a misinterpretation of the words of the head of state or a translation error. What he said was that in this moment he is thinking about the safety and the needs of the citizens. Hence, the participation of Lasso in the August 20 elections HAS NOT BEEN RULED OUT.

Obviously, this is beyond ridiculous but to be expected coming from an administration defined by its consistent amateurism and incompetence, especifically in the area of public relations. Yet f____ing up the announcement of the (non?-)candidacy of Lasso is a new low.

The final decision of Lasso about his potential candidacy should be announced in the next days, possibly during the mandatory ‘report to the Nation’ which must be made on 24 May, before the National Assembly says the Constitution. Except that, as there is no longer a legislature, this will be a simple public event in Quito.

[Sir John Johns]

Why is Yaku running for DSI and not MUPP?! A split in MUPP?! Will MUPP filed its own candidate?!

Yaku Pérez has left Pachakutik in May 2021, officially to protest against the parliamentary agreement between the indigenous party and CREO. He had however additional motivations, in first place the fact that Leonidas Iza (his nemesis inside the indigenous movement) was about to win the presidency of the CONAIE and become the best-placed candidate for the Pachakutik 2025 presidential nomination. Pérez unsuccessfully tried to register his own political party (‘Somos Agua’) before coming recently to an understanding with Gustavo Larrea, the owner of Democracia Sí Movement, who seems inclined to support Pérez’s second presidential bid. Larrea is himself too old and not enough popular (he is a pretty dull politician as well as an opportunist associated with both the Correa and Moreno administrations as well as the Bucaram presidency) to expect having a future in politics on his own (he received 0.4% of the vote in the last presidential election). The MDS could hence hoping winning seats in the legislature on the coattails of the more popular Pérez.

As for Pachakutik, it is for the moment, and just like the ID, plagued by internal divisions motivated by personal quarrels and disagreements over the strategy to follow. The party congress held in last April to elect a new national coordinator saw three candidates running: Guillermo Churuchumbi as the candidate of Iza; Cecilia Velasque, as the candidate of the outgoing coordination; Jorge Herrera, a former president of the CONAIE in the early 2010s. Churuchumbi has been elected with 355 votes against 289 for Velasque and 178 for Herrera; additionally, 113 blank votes and 20 null votes were cast.

So not a particularly convincing victory for Churuchumbi especially as, due to alleged irregularities and complaints from the losing candidates, the Pachakutik internal election tribunal has decided, two weeks ago, to just nullify the election of Churuchumbi and order the repeat of the election. Such decision has been been ignored by Churuchumbi and Iza and it is unclear when or even if a new election will take place to designate a new coordinator. So Pachakutik is finding itself without a recognized legal representative and that just as the selection of candidates is about to start: such situation is setting the stage for potential legal challenge against whoever is designated by the party to be the candidates in the presidential and legislative elections.

Not running a candidate in the presidential election would hurt too much Pachakutik in the legislative elections and undermine its pretense to be a big and ‘serious’ party to be thinkable. The endorsement of a candidate already ran by another party (like in 2017 with Paco Moncayo) or the nomination of a candidate outside the party (like in 1996, 2002 and 2013) cannot be totally excluded but would be clearly a step backwards.

I have see the name of Salvador Quishpe mentioned in various medias as a potential candidate but in case he is nominated I don’t think he will be endorsed by Iza and will probably be doomed to receive a poor result (he is an opportunist, has been accused of corruption and is too much associated to the parliamentary shenanigans of the last National Assembly). The most evident name is of course Iza himself, but he has remained so far silent over his intentions and, as mentioned, is challenged inside the party. In case he decide to run but doesn’t get the backing of Pachakutik he may possibly obtained the support of the UP, which is lacking a strong candidate for president and has already sponsored in last February the candidate of an ally of Iza for prefect of Cotopaxi against the official candidate of Pachakutik.

[Sir John Johns]

The PSC has issued a statement announcing it will not run a candidate coming from its ranks in the presidential election but will instead sponsor the candidacy of Jan Topic (who himself spells his name as Topić), an independent 40-year-old businessman and self-described expert in public security matters from Guayaquil. Topic, who has no previous political nor administrative experience, made public his presidential bid just few hours before the PSC released its statement.

https://twitter.com/jantopicecuador/status/1660375836464230404

For sure, Topic is an ‘interesting’ person. His credentials as an expert on international security and criminal matters appear mostly based on his experience as a former member of the French Foreign Legion and his past participation as ‘a soldier’ in wars in Syria, Ukraine (against Russia judging by recent ‘Slava Ukraini’ messages Topic posted on his Twitter account) and unspecified African countries. Topic claims being the founder of the largest security company in Ecuador.

Until few days ago, Jan Topic was also the main shareholder of Telconet, a telecommunication and technology company operating in Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala and Panama. Telconet is notably in charge of operating the undersea fiber-optic cable connecting Ecuador with Florida and is the only producer of fiber optic in Ecuador, making it a de facto private monopoly on the provision of that equipment in the country.

Jan Topic has just sold his actions in Telconet to his own father, Tomislav Topic, the founder and general manager of the company. In 2019, Tomislav has been investigated for possible money laundering in relation to his presumed involvement in the major corruption scheme set up by Jorge Glas and Ricardo Rivera, the uncle of Glas but also a former schoolmate of Tomislav in the polytechnic college of Guayaquil. Tomislav managed to avoid prosecution in the Odebrecht case by agreeing to hand over to the state anti-fraud unit the $13.5 million deposited by Rivera on an account belonging to Jan Topic. According to investigators, the money stemmed from a larger sum deposited on Rivera’s own account by a mysterious Glory International offshore company domiciled in Hong Kong and believed to have been used to transfer and launder money from kickbacks paid by private companies to Rivera and Glas in exchange of public contracts.

Tomislav pretended being unaware of the provenance of the money and denied being a business partner and a friend of Rivera despite evidence to the contrary. The existence of Glory International was revealed in 2016 during the tumultuous divorce of Tomislav that took place before a Miami court, the wife suspecting her future ex-husband of concealing part of his fortune in secret bank accounts having decided to go before a US court being herself a Florida resident and estimating an Ecuadorian court would be influenced by the political character of the case.

Seemingly, the division of family assets in the wake of the divorce didn’t go well as, in February 2019, Jan Topic was briefly detained by the police for attempted homicide, having been found in flagrante delicto of committing physical violence against his own brother (or half-brother) over the ownership of a house. The case was reclassified as intra-family violence but charges appear to have been quickly dropped.

A 2019 TV report on the incident:

Rivals of Jan Topic, in particular Fernando Villavicencio, have wasted no time to label the PSC candidate as a ‘Rambo’, a ‘mercenary’ and a chimbador only running to divide the right-wing vote and even alleged he is secretly in cahoots with the RC. Notwithstanding the fact that just one month ago, the Lasso administration seriously considered appointing Topic as secretary for state security.

Topic is already compared to Nayik Bukele for his strong focus on fight against criminality and his advocacy of mano dura to solve the issue of gang violence. Indeed, Topic has praised on his Twitter account the handling of crime by the Salvadorean leader. In the meantime, he is also cultivating a brand image of macho man and ‘alpha male’ at ease with guns; for example, this is the photograph various PSC bigwigs have chosen to illustrate their support to Topic:

https://twitter.com/VicenteAlmeydaJ/status/1660395777238106112

Considering how salient the issue of criminality and insecurity has became and the status of political outsider of Topic, he may have room to grow and establish himself as one of the major candidates.

In addition to the PSC and its leaders (Jaime Nebot, Esteban Torres), Topic has additionally received in the last hours the endorsement of Pedro Freile (who is hence renouncing to his own candidacy) and, more anecdotally, of Abdalá Bucaram, which is ironic not only because the former president is a criminal but also because of all the bad blood between him and Nebot, his longtime nemesis.


Also, Dalton Bacigalupo has already terminated his hopeless presidential candidacy to call for the constitution of a ‘multi-party force’ while Xavier Hervas has indicated he is not running because he ‘doesn’t have the time’.

[Sir John Johns]

The CNE has published the schedule of the special elections to designate the president and the National Assembly for the remaining of the 2023-25 term. The new head of state and legislature will remain in office for only one year and a half, meaning there will be de facto transitional authorities which will certainly mostly focus on the 2025 general elections. In order to save financial and personal resources, the CNE has also decided to organize the referendum on oil extraction in the Yasuní National Park the same day than the special elections, maybe not a good news for democratic debate as the discussion on extractivism will be probably overshadow by the presidential election.

Key dates of the election schedule are the following:

- 28 May to 10 June: internal selection processes and registration of the candidates

- 6 August: publication of the final and complete lists of candidates, once it has been verified they are meeting legal requirements and once political organizations have been have the opportunity to designate new candidates in case the first ones have seen their candidacies rejected by the CNE

- 8 to 17 August: election campaign

- 13 August: televised debates

- 20 August: election of assemblymen, presidential first round and referendum on Yasuní

- 23 September: proclamation of the results

- 24 September to 12 October: presidential runoff campaign

- 1 October: president runoff televised debate

- 15 October: presidential runoff

- 26 October: inauguration of the authorities elected in the first round

- 30 November: inauguration of the president, in case a runoff has been necessary

Due to the lack of time and financial resources, the electoral registry and distribution of polling stations will remain exactly the same compared to last February while voters living abroad would only be able to vote via telematic means, the CNE being unable to organize voting operations in the consulate offices in time. More generally, this whole new electoral process in a context of lack of time and shortage of money will be an operational challenge for the CNE which has previously not distinguished itself by its competence and timeliness. This is the recipe for a possible debacle.

Furthermore, the schedule is leaving very little time for political organizations to hold their selection processes and constitute their lists in the legislative elections, especially since is now enforced for the first time requirements to improve gender and age representativeness (a national party must has at least 30% of its parliamentary lists with a woman as its top candidate; at least 25% of candidates for legislative elections must be under 30).

The flash (nine days) official campaign is also leaving little time for the promotion of candidates which could prompt political organizations to prioritize candidates already familiar to voters (hence why the ID is apparently pulling out from the presidential race and why the names of Andrés Arauz and Carlos Rabascall, the two members of the 2021 presidential ticket, are insistently mentioned for the RC presidential slot Correísmo having not much other names available and no time to repeat the 2021 campaign experience when it nominated a then largely unknown figure as its presidential candidate but had six months to promote it).

Finally, having the Yasuní referendum held concurrently with the general elections sounds as quite bad for democratic debate as the whole discussion on that topic and the related question of extractivism will be largely overshadow by the presidential horse-race. It may also pose problems to the RC by forcing it to take a clear position or exposing itself as hypocrite on the matter: while Correa, when president, embraced an extractivist agenda and did his best to prevent the holding of referendums on oil exploitation and mining projects, the party has to some extent moved towards more environmental-friendly positions, at least at local level, as exemplified by the support of Pabel Muñoz to the campaign to forbade mining in Quito.

[Sir John Johns]

The list of people having declared as candidates or pre-candidates in the next presidential election has increased in the latest days while three of the most relevant political forces (RC, Pachakutik and CREO) are still to announce their pick. Having learned the harsh lesson from the last Quito municipal or the 2017 presidential election (when Moreno got almost elected in the first round thanks to the 40% of the vote and 10%-led over the second most-voted candidate rule) when fragmentation between a half-dozen of candidates led to (or almost led to) its electoral defeat, the Ecuadorian right has managed to unite behind a single candidacy and… No, I’m joking, there is again the half-dozen of candidates (some clearly doomed to receive a low single-digit result) all calling for ‘unity’ but not at the price of withdrawing their own candidacies. Seriously, if all of this ends with a runoff between Correa’s candidate and Iza, they will have no right to complain.

So, this how the field is looking right now:

* Jan Topic (PSC) has designated his running-mate, so far the only candidate to have done so, and it will be Pedro Freile, previously the 2021 AMIGO presidential candidate and the 2023 PSE-SUMA candidate for mayor of Quito. Freile has been in politics since not even three years but has already been a candidate for four different political parties. Amazing.

* Yaku Pérez has been formally endorsed by Gustavo Larrea’s DSI as well as by the UP and the PSE, the three parties having joined Pérez’s unregistered Somos Agua into the so-called Minka por la Vida coalition (‘minka for the life’ with minka or minga designating collective and benevolent action in the Kichwa culture). The PSE ditched its initial pre-candidate (the only female candidate so far, btw), Elsa Guerra, just a few days after her announcement; Guerra ran for prefect of Pichincha in last February as the candidate of the PSE-SUMA alliance that also sponsored the candidacy Freile in Quito and received then a respectable 8.5%.

* The candidacy of Fernando Villavicencio has received the support of Construye (ex-Ruptura 25), the party of María Paula Romo (the main political operator of President Moreno), which is particularly ironic for a candidate pretending to ‘eradicate all the mafias in public sector’ because Romo was in 2020 at the core of a massive scandal of corruption in public hospitals. Villavicencio’s alliance will also run for candidate in the legislative elections Ana Galarza, a CREO assemblywoman removed from office in 2019 by a vote of the parliament for influence peddling and requesting bribes (‘tithes’) from her parliamentary collaborators.

* Otto Sonnenholzner, who just graduated from Harvard, has received the endorsement of SUMA, Avanza and the ID, at least the faction to which belongs Dalton Bacigalupo. Only ten days before, Bacigalupo had warned Otto and Daniel Noboa about the ID not being on sale...

https://twitter.com/fabriciovelav/status/1663705499743682561

* Daniel Noboa, the leader of the unregistered National Democratic Action (ADN, also the initial letters of Noboa’s full name: Daniel Noboa Azín – this old trick will never die), has officially received the support of Arturo Moreno’s PID and MOVER, the later being the legal successor of Alianza PAIS. Yes, that same movement which ascend to power under Correa in 2006 by defeating Álvaro Noboa, the father of Daniel.

* Speaking of what, Álvaro Noboa has, of course, announced his presidential bid through the release of a video on social networks on 29 May. Noboa has already ran for president five time (1998, 2002, 2006, 2009 and 2013) going for barely missing the election in the runoff to a miserable 3.7% in the first round. In 2021, he unsuccessfully attempted to register his candidacy.

https://twitter.com/diariocorreoec/status/1663395697016569857

Noboa’s elocution in his presidential announcement is even more painful than usual and it seems doubtful the aging (72) billionaire could actually campaigning or participating in the public debates. Alvarito doesn’t bother to indicate which party will sponsor his candidacy (his own having been deregistered several years ago) nor mention the rival candidacy of his son. The announcement video has since been deleted without any explanation.

* The Democratic Center (CD), which is owned by Jimmy Jairala, is going to sponsor the candidacy of Eduardo Maruri, a Guayaquil businessman in advertisement sector (judging by his very detailed and very dithyrambic article on the Anglo Wikipedia he is indeed very good to advertise himself) and a 2007 constituent assemblyman in for UNO (A New Option), the short-lived right-leaning party he established. Maruri has also been the president of the Barcelona Sporting Club soccer club from 2007 until his abrupt resignation in 2010, when leaving the club heavily indebted after a disastrous season where it barely avoided being relegated in second division. Maruri is pretending not to be a chimbador candidate and running ‘to win’ while talking about running the country with a ‘businessman mentality’ and getting ‘results’ thanks to ‘the best working team’.

* AMIGO may opt to run Bolívar Armijos, a former local elected official in Esmeraldas Province (president of the Calderón rural parish) as well as the former chairman of the Rural Parishes Governments National Council of Ecuador (CONAGOPAR) between 2014 and 2019. His management at head of the institution has been criticized and investigated over presumed financial irregularities. Once a hardcore support of Rafael Correa, Armijos weirdly enough announced in 2019 he would be the Correísta presidential candidate with Correa as his running-mate, a surprising proclamation considering his lack of notoriety and political experience at high level. Ultimately, Armijos only obtained a spot on the UNES parliamentary national list and failed to win a seat. He has since founded his (unregistered) party, the Rural and Productive Force, and made in 2022 a tweet to endorse the candidacy of Nicolás Lapentti for prefect of Guayas.

* Rumors about Jorge Yunda planning something with Pedro Granja, some lawyer who is looking like a bit mentally deranged, while Carlos Sagnay de la Bastida is making noise to indicate he is available to run a fourth time (and for a fourth different party because all the ones he had ran for have been subsequently de-registered) for president on the grounds of a made-up poll (15,000 respondents of wjhom 60% face-to-face, yeah totally credible) placing him third.


Meanwhile, the names of the candidates ran by the RC, Pachakutik and CREO are remaining undecided or undisclosed.

* Guillermo Lasso, who came back from the United States where he had (once more) underwent surgery, will announce his decision in the next days. But CREO is already disintegrating: Francisco Jiménez (minister for government in 2022-23 and a key political operator of Lasso who started his career as a Guayas governor in the early years of the Correa administration) has announcing his departure from the ruling party and the creation of his own political party (‘National Organized Citizen Action’, Acción) which intends to participate in some way in the upcoming elections even if it has no time to register.

* The nomination of the RC candidate will reportedly been decided between three names: Andrés Arauz (the 2021 candidate), Carlos Rabascall (the head of an advertisement company and the 2021 vice-presidential candidate) and Luisa González.

The latter, whose name is aggressively promoted by Vinicio Alvarado (an influential political adviser to Correa who also worked for Cristina Kirchner and on the 2022 successful campaign of Gustavo Petro), has been an assemblywoman from Manabí since 2021 after having hold a collection of technocratic jobs without much public exposure (national secretary for public administration under Correa for just five months in 2017; adviser for the Ecuadorian Post Office public company; consul general in Alicante, Spain; general-secretary in the Superintendency for Companies, Securities and Insurances; general-secretary of the Andean Parliament).

González has a major advantage over her competitors inside the RC: she has been a staunch and devoted supporter of Correa (or presumed so) unlike Arauz and Rabascall who have both previously attempted to distance themselves a bit from the former president (Arauz in the 2021 runoff campaign, at least according to Aquilés Álvarez; Rabascall by publicly declaring in late 2021 his intention to run for president in 2025). Loyalty is the main argument sold by Alvarado to push the candidacy of González.

However, González has also detractors inside the RC because she is little known – for what it’s worth, she’s not even has an article on the Spanish Wikipedia – (meaning resources would have to be invested to promote her among voters and that, as she haven’t faced much scrutiny until now, there is the risk of a skeleton in the closet emerging during the campaign and derailing her candidacy; a bit similar to what happened to Arauz few days before the runoff when it was revealed he was on the payroll of the government until 2020). She also made some strong stances against abortion, opposing notably a bill on legalizing abortion in case of rape on the grounds it would equate to ‘legalize the homicide of a baby’, something that would again pissed up social progressive and feminist sectors.

For his part, Arauz may also has problems because of his recent appointment by Lula to head the quixotic plan for a Latin American currency as an alternative to the US dollar; back in 2021, he was campaigning on the promise to strengthen the dollarization. Such turnaround may help reinforce the characterization of Arauz as a dishonest and deceitful politician (Andrés, no mientas otra vez was a tagline Lasso repeated several times during the 2021 face-to-face presidential debate).

At this point, the RC candidate is probably favored to win the election but the choice of a poor candidate by Correa could, like in 2021, screw things up.

* Finally, two candidates have registered for the nomination as the candidate for Pachakutik: Salvador Quishpe and Leonidas Iza. The latter has been officially proposed to run by Marlon Santi, the coordinator of Pachakutik and a strong opponent of Iza inside the indigenous movement, probably because a candidacy of Iza would boost Pachakutik candidates in the legislative elections. However, Iza has posed conditions for his nomination, notably the confirmation of Churuchumbi as the next party coordinator and the exclusion of the list of legislative candidates of all incumbent legislators he accuses of having fraternize with Lasso, in first place Guadalupe Llori and Ricardo Vanegas (the later having however already announced he will run for reelection for the alliance led by Villavicencio).

[Sir John Johns]

* Fernando Villavicencio (Construye) has picked Andrea González Nader as his running-mate. A 36-year-old environmental engineer, González Nader is an environmental activist notably involved in the protection of the Guayas tropical dry forest. The host of the environment-theme EcoVerde web-radio, she has some experience in electoral politics, firstly as the UP candidate for vice-prefect of Guayas in 2019, secondly as a candidate for National Assembly on the national list of the Honesty Alliance (PSE and Concertación) on spot #2; the list was headed by Villavicencio.

This is a bit of surprising move as it was rumored that Villavicencio, who had previously indicated his running-mate would be a woman from the Costa, would designated Liliana Febres-Cordero, the daughter of the late PSC president. Maybe an attempt to move towards the center and reach voters concerned about environmental issues as the law-and-order/pro-business niche begins to be overcrowded.

However, a quick search on González Nader’s twitter account is returning no recent results about the salient issue of Yasuní and the consulta on that topic and she seems to be mostly concerned about threats on the environment on the single Guayaquil area. Her brand of environmentalism sounds more like nimbyism than an opposition to Ecuador's current extractivism-based economic model.


* Bolívar Armijos (AMIGO) also picked his running-mate: Gerson Almeida, a pro-life evangelical pastor and homophobic anti-vaxx conspiracy nutcase, who previously ran for president in 2021 as the candidate of Edwin Moreno’s Ecuatoriano Unido and received 1.7% of the vote. He then faced a lot of criticisms for his theocratic discourse and pretty deranged views.

https://twitter.com/GersonAlmeidaEc/status/1664379864961384449

Honored with my brother in Christ, Bolívar Armijos, lawyer with experience and outreach in the parishes; he has invited me on this presidential ticket for life, for peace, solidarity, free market and secured business. For the country.

God bless Ecuador.

God, Homeland and Freedom! [national motto of Ecuador]

Arguably, Armijos-Almeida is already a strong contender for the sh**ttiest presidential ticket in this election.

[Sir John Johns]

Important developments:

https://twitter.com/PrimeraPlanaECU/status/1664675411077234721

‘Pachakutik is captured by the oligarchy’ denounced Jairo Cantincuz, president of the Conaice, who informed that in concert with the bases of the Conaie it has been agreed to withdraw the candidacy of Leonidas Iza.

The Enlarged Council of the Conaie decided unanimously to withdraw the candidacy of Leonidas Iza in the extraordinary elections.

Followers of Iza are denouncing the non-fulfillment of the conditions demanded by the CONAIE president to accept a potential nomination, in first place the handing-over of the Pachakutik coordination to Guillermo Churuchumbi and the exclusion of the pro-Lasso legislators from the selection process of legislative candidates. The CONAIE will also not supported other candidates also registered for the presidential nomination (read Salvador Quishpe).


And Lasso isn’t running:

https://twitter.com/FerminVaca/status/1664695898742444032

URGENT: Guillermo Lasso announces that he will not run in the 20 August elections, but says this will not be the ‘final point’ for his political project but ‘a new beginning’. Lasso will move forward with his usual work schedule.

Lasso calls upon ‘genuine democrats’ to not cling to power. And asks candidates to analyze whether their candidacies are necessaries. Lasso says he ‘will return with the head held high’ suggesting he doesn’t rule out 2025.

A 2025 candidacy is totally delusional and good luck for the new beginning with a dying party.

And while on his way out, Lasso is finding himself embroiled in another possible corruption scandal:

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/article275955681.html

As the president of Ecuador faced threats of impeachment for alleged corruption, a tiny Miami public relations firm was given a six-figure contract to lobby journalists to publish favorable stories about the embattled leader — not in Ecuador, where his political fortunes were dire, but in British and U.S. media markets, including in Miami, interviews and public records show.

Mysteries abound over the $250,000 PR payment benefiting President Guillermo Lasso, according to a joint investigation by the Miami Herald, the Organized Crime and and Corruption Reporting Project and Ecuador’s Plan V Magazine. Where did it originate? Why embark on a Florida-based charm offensive if you are struggling to stay afloat politically in Ecuador? Was it money from the Ecuadorian public till diverted to political use, which would be improper — and which Lasso’s press secretary denies? Did a benefactor come to Lasso’s aid? Did the wealthy president, previously linked to tens of millions in South Florida real estate, pick up the tab himself?

[Sir John Johns]

* And there is a last-minute change in the election regulations provoking the collapse of two of the already announced presidential tickets and messing up the ongoing constitution of the parliamentary lists. The Election National Council (CNE) has made the decision to disregard provisions of the 2020 ‘Code of Democracy’ (electoral code) originally intended to be implemented starting from the 2025 general elections. Such provisions are prescribing the introduction of mandatory gender parity on presidential tickets and a 50% quota of women as top candidates for all the lists ran by political organizations in the legislative elections. The CNE decided such changes should not applied during the 2023 extraordinary elections (which 2020 legislators could obviously not be aware of) but this has been challenged before the Electoral Dispute Tribunal (TCE) by feminist groups. And the TCE has ruled in favor of the feminist groups on 2 June and ordered the CNE to implement the gender parity rules in the extraordinary elections of this year. The CNE then announced it would not file a recourse against the TCE ruling (presumably to not further complicate the organization of the elections) and immediately proceeded to amend the electoral regulation to enable an immediate entry into force of the gender parity requirements. It also pushed back the deadline to register candidacies from 7 to 10 June.

As a consequence, the candidacies for vice-presidency of Pedro Freile (PSC) and Gerson Almeida (AMIGO) are no longer valid and Topic and Armijos now need to find a new (female) running-mate. A bad outcome for them as they could have expected benefiting from the presence of a more well-known candidate for vice-president on the ticket to boost their own presidential candidacy.


* So just a week remaining before the deadline for registering candidacies. Best moment ever for starting a coup in the ID!

https://twitter.com/PrimeraPlanaECU/status/1664797083507752960

Analía Ledesma is now at the head of the ID. The Ethics Council suspended Enrique Chávez for ‘serious electoral infringement’ because he disaffiliated from the Patriotic Society Party (PSP) only in 2022 and according to the party’s statuses he couldn’t be a party leader within four years.

Chávez has been elected as the party’s acting president in April 2022 during an extraordinary congress that removed the then-president, Guillermo Herrera. The latter challenged the legality of the election of Chávez but the CNE ruled in favor of Chávez and recognized him as the head of the self-described social-democratic party.

The official Twitter account of the ID has however released a statement assuring the only legal (interim) president of the party is and remains Chávez and pretending that neither Ledesma nor the members of the ‘Ethics Council’ are actually affiliated with the ID and accusing them of usurping party duties to take control of the ID and influence the candidates nomination process. In the statement, support for the presidential candidacy of Otto Sonnenholzner is also reasserted.

In 2021, the five most-voted political organizations were CREO, the RC, the PSC, the ID and Pachakutik. At the moment, two (the RC and the PSC) are de facto ran from abroad by insufferable autocratic assholes (Correa who is living in Belgium since 2017, even before judicial processes had been started against him; Jaime Nebot who has relocated in the United States and, in spite of having officially retired from politics, is still pulling the strings in the PSC), two (the ID and Pachakutik) are plagued by insurmountable internal disputes and legal challenges over their legitimate leadership and, finally, the last one (CREO) has decided to commit political suicide.

The term of 'non-party system' I have seen used to describe Peru's political environment can probably be applied to Ecuador I think.


* Finally, as if the whole thing wasn’t already enough ridiculous, a new video from Álvaro Noboa has been published on his Facebook account. In this one, the banana magnate painfully delivers a call to Ecuadorians to join his fight ‘for changing, improving and modernizing’ the country without clarifying whether he is running for president or not. Neither is mentioned the presidential bid of his own son.

[Sir John Johns]

The ‘Hoxhaists’ are the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador (PCMLE), an unregistered party (so can’t directly participate into the elections) which has however its electoral front, the Popular Unity (Unidad Popular, UP). The UP has joined the Minka por la Vida alliance supporting the candidacy of Yaku Pérez, an alliance also made up by the Ecuadorian Socialist Party (PSE), Democracia Sí as well as Pérez’s unregistered Somos Aguas.

On its website, the PCMLE is informing us of the UP’s decision with a statement titled ‘the revolutionary left supports Yaku Pérez’.

The unity in these times is vitally important to strengthen the popular movement, the presentation of a proposal showing the class independence of the left enables the peoples of Ecuador to have an option distinct from the right and Correísmo. The political parties and organizations of the left are working to develop a large political and social front with the aims to confront neoliberalism and Correísmo in the extraordinary elections that will take place on August 20, 2023.

In this context, Popular Unity has made public its support to the candidacy of Yaku Pérez to the presidency of the Republic of Ecuador; this support is the result of the internal democracy that this organization undertook during its National Council, summoned on 24 May 2023 and in which more than 600 delegates from the various provinces of the country participated.

As for other Ecuadorian political parties, the ideology claimed by the PCMLE/UP should not be taken at face value. The ‘Hoxhaist’ party and its electoral front is mostly a vehicle to defend the interests of the main teachers organization (UNE) as well as various labor and student unions. Such unions have a rather limited following (the indigenous movement is now the driving force of social protest). Worth remembering that social and economic conditions in Ecuador (lack of major industries; prominence of informal employment, unemployment and underemployment; weak civil service; legislation unfavorable to unionization) have not provided a fertile ground for the development of a relevant labor movement in Ecuador.

The PCMLE, the UP (and its MPD forerunner) have all been hostile to the Correa administration for a variety of reasons but notably a reform of the public education sector opposed by the UNE, the criminalization of social protest and the attempt from Correa to dissolve the UNE for bogus administration reasons combined with his support to the creation of state-sponsored rival unions (United Confederation of Labor – CUT; Red de Maestros; those are ironically now the unions the most favorable to the Lasso government). Hostility to Correa from the ‘Hoxhaists’ went as far to what was an endorsement of Lasso in the 2017 runoff and a call to protest against a manipulation of the result by the government; the PCMLE then issued an editorial titled ‘A rout of Correísmo will be a political victory for the people’. I’m not sure such decision would have received the ‘Enver Hoxha seal of approval’.

The UP is now following the ‘neither Correa nor Lasso’ strategy already used in 2021 and advocated by Yaku Pérez and approved in the runoff by the CONAIE (‘ideological null vote’), in contrast with Iza’s position to overcome the pro-Correa/anti-Correa cleavage.

[Sir John Johns]

* Rumors than CREO will field as its presidential candidate Esteban Bernal, the current minister for social and economic inclusion and party leader since last May. Bernal has previously served as an assemblyman in 2017-19 and unsuccessfully ran for prefect of Azuay in 2019 (placing then third with 18.1% of the votes).

* The Patriotic Society Party (PSP) has declined running a candidate in the presidential election. Its leader, former president Lucio Gutiérrez (received 1.8% of the votes in the 2021 presidential election) has announced it will instead support the candidacy of Jan Topic. A logical choice considering the traditional penal populism championed by the PSP and its long-time advocacy of heavy hand methods to solve criminality and corruption problems.

* The first presidential ticket has been officially registered with the CNE. Daniel Noboa will be the candidate of the ‘ADN 2023’ alliance made up by the PID and the MOVER with Verónica Abad as his running-mate. A rather obscure political figure, Abad has been the candidate of AMIGO for mayor of Cuenca at the beginning of the year, placing seventh with 5.3% of the votes. During the campaign, she displayed some strong anti-abortion and homophobic stances, making notably criticisms against ‘gender ideology’. As she describes herself in her Twitter account biography as a ‘fusionist politician/coach entrepreneur’, retweet Thatcher’s quotes and is certainly the ‘Veronica Abad of Cuenca’ who published in 2015 an opinion piece criticizing Correa on the website founded by Nicolás Márquez (an Argentinian alt-right ideologue and supporter of Gómez Centurión), I think we can have a rather clear idea about where she is standing politically.

According to La Posta, the nomination of Abad could however be challenged on the grounds she resigned from the Azuay provincial direction of AMIGO after having registered her candidacy with the PID-MOVER alliance. Her former party, which received her formal resignation only yesterday, is contemplating filing a recourse before the electoral authorities.

[Sir John Johns]

RIP Creating Opportunities Movement (2011-2023)

Esteban Bernal has just announced CREO will not run candidates this year, neither in the presidential nor the legislative elections. He also declared that the party will not campaign for a candidate and that CREO members can vote for whichever candidate they want, only mentioning the ‘red lines’ that are Correísmo and ‘parties which didn’t respected the Constitution and the laws like the PSC’. He has also attacked Esteban Torres, claiming he doesn’t believe the former PSC parliamentary leader has respected the Constitution, the laws, the rules governing the country and political ethic.

Then he went on his phone and retweet these unbelievable proclamations (are they seriously believing this bullsh!t???):

https://twitter.com/matiasabadm/status/1666125777019056129

GIVING IN IS NOT LOSING. The decision of the movement is in full CONSISTENCY with the announcement of the President.

The true call to UNITY has to transcend the words and translate into action, like this one, in favor of democracy and freedom.

Let it be a precedent.

https://twitter.com/Ariannaburgosca/status/1666123565542912000

We will be back in 2025! With more force! For now our work continues.

[Sir John Johns]

Hervas has finally found time for a presidential bid, but not for the ID, instead it will be for RETO. What a joke.

https://twitter.com/eluniversocom/status/1666527068404826112

The businessman Xavier Hervas will be a presidential candidate for the Total Renovation Movement (RETO), list 33.

For his part, Eduardo Maruri has decided to give up and announced he is withdrawing his hopeless and useless candidacy and endorsing Otto Sonnenholzner. The CD has clarified the decision of Maruri is personal and not reflects the position of the movement which will announce later what will be its role in the presidential election.



https://twitter.com/FerminVaca/status/1666258537826140161

In a statement, the PSC reserves the right to nominate the candidate for the vice presidency of the Republic in its alliance with Jan Topic, in what appears a dissent with the nomination, announced by the campaign of Topic, of Diana Jácome.

Topic has designated Diana Jácome, a lawyer and TV journalist from Quito, as his running-mate. The problem is that Jacóme is accused of having been (still being?) close to Correísmo, an accusation ‘supported’ by an old 2017 tweet in which she expressed ‘an eternal affection’ for Correa for ‘everything he has done for [the] country’ as well as photographs published on social networks on which she can be seen wearing the Alianza PAIS light green shirt or standing next to Mauro Andino, a pro-Correa lawyer and public figure.

This is angering the PSC leadership which is wanting a vice president candidate sharing ‘a social market economy philosophy’ and ‘totally detached from both socialism of any century and from a right alien to social justice and conscience’ (yes, the last part is to tackle CREO).

[Sir John Johns]

So, what exactly is the path forward for the Ecuadorian right?

What could be considered as the Ecuadorian Right (or rather the Ecuadorian Rights because rightist/conservative/oligarchic parties have never has formed an organic and united political bloc and their respective voting base is far from overlapping, being divided by a strong regional cleavage) is at the moment split into four of five presidential candidacies (Topic, Villavicencio, Sonnenholzner, Hervas and Daniel Noboa), each with a chance (even the slightest one) of coming on top of the pack and facing the RC candidate (the most-voted first round candidate in all likeliness at this point) in the runoff (providing Yaku Pérez, who is on a different political segment doesn’t surpass them all). The self-termination of CREO has reduced the fragmentation of the right-leaning vote and increased the chances for a right-wing candidate to go to the runoff, but there is still too much candidates in the race vying for that part of the electorate, bringing the risk the traditional right is eliminated in the first round (something that already happened in 1988, 2002 and arguably 2006; there has been no runoff in 2009 and 2013 when Correa was easily reelected).

It is really hard at the moment to assess which candidate is the strongest one (especially as polls are largely unreliable) and the dynamics of the campaign will play certainly a major role to determine which one will place ahead, but it is possible that none manage to take the lead and that the right-leaning vote ends up evenly split between three or four candidacies. Furthermore, the considerable distrust and even hatred among the various factions of the Ecuadorian right (in particular, the PSC which is at odds with Villavicencio and CREO, the later, while not running, is still keeping an influence, notably thanks to its control over the central government financial and material resources) is making a convergence behind a single first round candidacy unlikely; the insurmountable divisions inside the Right may led to bad transfers and ultimately prove fatal for the right-wing candidate who would have made the runoff.

More broadly, the general political and economic environment and the disastrous record of the Lasso administration (first right-wing president elected since 1998) isn’t very favorable for classic right-wing candidates. Voters will not be particularly enthused by promises of tax cuts for the wealthy, diminishing role of the state, austerity, fiscal balance and labor deregulation when the country is hit hard by poverty and malnutrition, when public services (in particular health sector) is collapsing because of cuts and lay-offs in civil service and when the central government is struggling to help victims of natural disasters (like for the Alausí landslide in last March or the dramatic floods that have devastated Esmeraldas province this week).

The only issue, a right-winger could be favored may be the rising criminality and related gang violence but, firstly, the main champion of law-and-order (Topic) has structural weaknesses (he compares himself with Bukele, but unlike Topic Bukele had already a long political experience when he was elected president of El Salvador), secondly the Lasso administration, the Guayaquil PSC and Freile in Quito all campaigned heavily on security matters on last February, but this didn’t save them from electoral rout (probably because their own record on the matter wasn’t particularly shining).

And, if somehow, Sonnenholzner, Topic or Villavicencio manage to go to the runoff and beat Correa’s candidate to become the next president, there is great chance such hypothetical victory ends up as a pyrrhic victory. Indeed, whoever enters Carondelet Palace in next November will inherit a particularly bad situation with a lot of worrying issues (criminality, emigration, decay of the state, social discontent, environmental and climatic crisis - El Niño is predicted to return in the next months, with potential disastrous human and economical consequences) and a deteriorated budgetary situation and in uncertain times on economic and international fronts (Ecuador is currently scoring the third highest country risk in Latin America), all of this with not even eighteen months before returning to the polls for general elections. Finally, unless he is Correa’s candidate (and even Correa’s candidate isn’t ensured to enjoy such thing) the next president has great chances of not having a working majority in the legislature and to face a hostile CPCCS. In these conditions, he will have to constantly negotiate to get things done.

So, the better for the Right may be to ‘skip’ this presidential election, to let the new president crash and prepare for 2025. The problem is that the Ecuadorian Right is at the moment very disorganized in term of political organization (the PSC is the only relevant party of the bunch; SUMA, Avanza, Construye, RETO, PID and MOVER are either minor parties either organizations only existing on paper) and is lacking a strong network of local elected officials, in particular in the major cities (Guayaquil, Quito, Cuenca). Not the best condition for a strong comeback.

[Sir John Johns]

Sir John could detail more later, but RC announced what the controversial former VP Jorge Glas was their presidential (pre)candidate with Luisa González as their running-mate. Glas was just reinstalled of his political rights after a court sentence from a judge of Yaguachi (but the National Justice Court president says that judge commited "prevaricato"). Glas relinquished anyway from the candidature, now Gónzalez will be the main candidate and Andrés Arauz (2021 candidate/runner-up) will be her new running-mate.

It is unclear to me what has been the RC plan with the Glas candidacy, whether it has just been a media stunt or if it seriously considered running Glas as a candidate before renouncing in the face of the inevitable legal challenges.

The chronology has been the following one:

- on early June, the RC announced having selected its presidential ticket but didn’t disclose the identity of the candidates.

- on 7 June, the Constitutional Court ruled that judges producing suspicious sentences in requests of habeas corpus, injunctions and actions for protection of the rights of defendants and convicts could face legal proceedings for ‘prevaricato’ (misapplication of the law).

In its ruling (related to an injunction issued against the Central Bank), the Court established there have been abuses of protective measures leading to sentences openly contrary to the constitution. Indeed, there has been a sharp increase of grants of protective measures by local judges. This has led to the releases from jail of drug traffickers (including an Albanian mobster fugitive from Albanian, Italian and Belgian justices and a Lithuanian drug trafficker subject to an Interpol red notice) as well as politicians sentenced for corruption (in first place Jorge Glas himself)

Protective measures have also been used to interfere in political processes (like the judicial attempts of Guadalupe Llori to prevent her removal from the presidency of the National Assembly).

- on 9 June, a judge of Yaguachi (Guayas) issued a temporary injunction restoring the political rights the former vice president has lost when sentenced for corruption and sent a notification to the CNE. The sentence is going against the Constitution and the Democracy Code which are stating that condemnatory sentences in crimes against public administration entails the loss of political rights for life; the loss of political rights for persons sentenced in corruption cases has been furthermore approved in the 2018 mega-referendum with 73.7% of ‘yes’.

The same judge has previously released from jail ‘alias Ariel’, one of the leaders of the Los Lobos drug gang and  unsuccessfully attempted last month to prevent the inauguration of the elected mayor of Portoviejo on the grounds he didn’t attended the mandatory televised debate during the campaign (for the good reason he was recovering from an assassination attempt by drug gang members…)

- the same day, RC announced the presidential ticket will be headed  by a male candidate.

- again on 9 June, the president of the National Court of Justice, Iván Saquicela, tweeted about the importance of not letting prevaricato in the Ecuadorian justice going unpunished, without explicitly mentioning the Yaguachi judge.

Yet, Rafael Correa quickly replied to Saquicela tweet by calling him a ‘piece of scoundrel’ and insinuating he has ascended to the head of the National Court in reward for his involvement in the sentencing of the former president in the Sobornos 2012-2016 case. The former president also started a poll on Twitter to ask his followers whether Glas should be the 2023 RC presidential candidate. Out of 50,000 voters, Glas won with 53.1% with Correa indicating that ‘most of those who voted ‘no’ did it to safeguard Jorge’.

- the following day, in the RC convention held in Portoviejo, the national president of the party, Marcela Aguiñaga, announced the political bureau has unanimously designated Glas as its presidential candidate. Glas then made a discourse in which he notably attacked Lenín Moreno and Lasso but, after about only ten minutes, he announced the withdrawal of his candidacy, arguing of the high risk of a rejection of his candidacy. Subsequently, the political bureau was invited to vote on the new González-Arauz presidential ticket and approved it.



Reactions about the Portoviejo convention and the short-lived candidacy of Glas are contrasted.

Some observers have described it a ‘master move’ as it enabled to monopolize media space while underlining the facts that González is the only female candidate and that only the RC has organized a mass event to announce their presidential candidates.

Others are pointing out the whole thing has been mostly a self-congratulatory celebration of Correa with the RC local authorities elected on last February (Pabel Muñoz, Paola Pabón and Aquiles Álvarez) not having been featured. The demotion of Arauz, the representative of the ‘left’ part of the RC, to the vice presidential spot to make room for a Correa super-loyalist and largely unknown assemblywoman has also been noticed as well as the sidelining of Rabascall, the 2021 vice-presidential candidate and a well-known face of the ‘right’ wing of the RC.

Feminists are also furious about the nomination of González, who, as an assemblywoman staunchly opposed legislation to legalize abortion in case of rape and displayed on this occasion the light blue scarf (pañuelo celeste) introduced by the Argentinian pro-life movement and generally associated with right-wing if not very right-wing groups.
      
https://twitter.com/mariasolborja/status/1667602071766327298

Like Arauz in 2021, González can’t claim a personal measure on her own in spite of her long participation in the bureaucracy of the Correa administration and run the risk of being defined for her sole social conservative stance and closeness to the former president. Additionally, she is hailing from Manabí province, already the stronghold of Correísmo, and is of not much use to win back voters in the highlands.

With the designation of González (because nobody believes the fiction she has been democratically selected by the party’s base and political bureau), Correa is making clear he has not changed and is unrepentant about his errors during his government and the 2021 campaign and has indicated privileging loyalty over popularity in the selection of the candidate.

In a recent interview to El País (partly behind paywall), the former president has exposed one could be the main plank of the next RC government: declaring the 2018 referendum results invalid, in particular the approval of the amendment restoring term limits. As put by Correa: ‘We do not rule out the possibility to summon a constituent assembly, not to implement a new constitution, even if there will be reforms, but above all to declare that 2018 referendum invalid and install new state authorities’ (taking over the state institutions is also include in the package).

The summoning of a constituent assembly requires a two-third vote in the National Assembly; normally, a simple referendum to reverse the 2018 amendments could be summoned by the president but I guess the chances of victory may be a little too uncertain.
      
In that same interview, Correa is also warning the attorney general, Diana Salazar, she will face justice; the new CPCCS has indeed already lay the grounds for her removal on the grounds she had plagiarized her university thesis. Presumably, the point is to nullify the sentencing of Correa in the Sobornos 2012-2016 case, then remove the term limits and enable the former president to run for a fourth term in office in 2025.


In another news related to the RC, Jefferson Pérez’s local Renace is endorsing the González-Arauz ticket. Pérez has previously been a staunch critic of Correa but reportedly has obtained a spot on the RC list in election for Azuay provincial assemblymen for one of his allies.

[Sir John Johns]

Otto Sonnelholzner accepted his pre-candidature from the "Actuemos" alliance of Avanza and SUMA, with the support of ID. The third alliance to be confirmed after the ones who support Daniel Noboa (ADN: PID-MOVER) and Yaku Pérez ("Claro que se Puede": UP-PSE-MDSí). Jairala' CD announced his support to Jan Topic, Kiwicha doctor Luz Marina Vega will be Hervas' running mate.

Further details on this:

* Otto Sonnenholzner has picked Érika Paredes as his running-mate. Like Sonnenholzner, Paredes has recently graduated from Harvard College. Previously she has worked in various UN agencies and has been a coordinator for international affairs in the presidency of Ecuador between 2013 and 2016, so under Correa (something that isn't pleasing right-wingers).

      
* Yaku Pérez has also unveiled the candidate for vice-president of his Claro que se puede alliance: Nory Pinela, an obscure vice-dean of the private Ecotec University located in the affluent Samborondón canton. Not many more information on her. A quick glance on her largely inactive Twitter account is only showing uncontroversial messages and retweets of Pope Francis. Doesn’t sound like a left-wing profile.


* The alliance supporting Jan Topic will be named ‘Juntos Triunfaremos’ (JT: same initials than the candidate). Also Jimmy Jairala is confirming he is the most opportunist politician in Ecuador if not in the whole Latin America.

      
* Luz Marina Vega is additionally the wife of Auki Tituaña, a veteran indigenous politician (mayor of Cotacachi between 1996 and 2009 for Pachakutik and between 2019 and 2023 for Concertación; in the meantime, he had been announced as the running-mate of Guillermo Lasso for the 2013 presidential election but his nomination was successfully challenged by Pachakutik) as well as the sister of Nina Pacari, a renown indigenous activist who briefly served as the first indigenous foreign minister in 2003.

She *may* bring some indigenous voters, an electorate in which Hervas largely under-performed in 2021.


* It seems Pachakutik like the ID will not have its own candidate in the presidential election. The indigenous party is reportedly negotiating the endorsement of either Yaku Pérez either Xavier Hervas.

In any case, the CONAIE has announced it will not support nor campaign for any candidate in the first round, a decision supported by both Iza and the aforementioned Nina Pacari (an opponent to Iza in the indigenous confederation).

The CONAIE will also held a march on next 13 June, jointly with the National Anti-Mining Front, to defend ‘life, water, nature and territories’ and to support the ‘yes’ in the consulta on prohibiting oil extraction in Yasuní as well as in the planned Quito local consulta to prohibit mining activities in the Choco (it could be held on the same day than the extraordinary elections and Yasuní consulta).

In the message announcing the march, Iza criticized Yaku Pérez for being ‘inconsistent’ on environmental issues as the indigenous candidate and rival of Iza in the indigenous movement has moderated his anti-mining stances.