Ecuadorian Politics and Elections | end of the indigenous protests (for now)

[Sir John Johns]

Some highlights of the ongoing internal selection processes of candidates for the 5 February 2023 local elections when mayors and provincial prefects, among other local officials, will be elected.

Here are some declared/rumored/selected candidates who are required to have the support of registered national or local party to run for office. Beware, this isn’t the definitive list of candidates as internal primaries aren’t yet completed (they will ended on 5 August), as many declared ‘candidates without a party’ are negotiating with ‘parties without a candidate’ to get a nomination. Additionally, judicial challenges have to be expected from sore loser candidates while a few candidates are awaiting court decision to know if they are eligible to run.

The registration of candidacies will start on 22 August and conclude one month later, on 20 September with parties having until early December to replace candidates who have been ruled as ineligible or have withdrawn. The official complete list of candidates will be published on 18 December.

The tidbits of information on the candidates for prefects or mayors aren’t very encouraging on the renewal of the political class, the strength and the ideological/programmatic consistency of every single national political party, some limits on the fragmentation that led to mayors and prefects with a questionable electoral legitimacy (these offices are elected in a FPTP single round) and the end of the cambio de camiseta (‘change of shirt’, an expression coming from football world designating politician switching parties). Quite the contrary, while stuff like ideology or half-coherent political orientation has never been particularly important on local level, this year I think unprecedented levels of insanity and nonsense have been reached, including in major cities where political organizations are supposed to be most structured than in remote rural places.

Judge by yourself with the list of rumored candidates in various cities and provinces.

Quito

Prepare your aspirin because all these cambios de camiseta and the plethora of candidates not matching the professed ideology of the party sponsoring their candidacies will give you headache.

* The right-leaning incumbent mayor, Santiago Guarderas, who is in office since last year and the removal of Jorge Yunda (elected in 2019) for allegations of corruption, is running for reelection but hasn’t yet found a party to sponsor his candidacy. The fake party (Ecuadorian Union) which sponsored his 2019 election (as deputy mayor) and this one of Yunda has been de-registered.

* Jorge Yunda, the former populist mayor whose has been removed twice last year (the municipal council vote to remove him was canceled by a local judge who ordered Yunda’s reinstatement, a decision itself canceled by the Constitutional Court which confirmed several weeks later the removal of Yunda), is wanting his job back and has announced a new mayoral bid with the apparent and unexpected support of Pachakutik.

Given Yunda’s personal and professional background (a former popular singer, radio host and chairman of the main football club of the capital as well as a native from a rural canton of the central highlands with some indigenous ancestry) and his ability to connect with low-income segments of the city, this could seriously hurt the chances of the RC candidate (see below).

Rafael Correa has sensed the danger and posted on Twitter a message in which he calls Yunda a chimbador (spoiler candidate only running to hurt another candidate) and pretending the bid of the former mayor may be part of some shady deal with the government to get the corruption charges against him dropped. The irony is that Yunda has jumped into electoral politics in 2017 when elected an assemblyman from Pichincha under the banner of Correa’s Alianza PAIS and has been until recently depicted by right-winger outlets like 4Pelagatos as being in bed with Correísmo.

* The RC candidate is Pabel Muñoz, an economist and a former national secretary for planning in the Correa administration who is currently serving as an assemblyman. He is one of the most visible legislators of the UNES bench so his resignation from the legislature for a very hypothetical victory as mayor of Quito (a city where the Correísmo has bled voters since almost a decade) may be not the best move for the RC. Especially as Muñoz’s technocratic profile is probably not very fitting to (re)gain voters in the low-income neighborhoods, especially if Yunda or Hervas are running.

* The 2019 Correísta candidate, Luisa Maldonado, who placed second with 18.4% (against 21.4% for Yunda) has left the RC few months ago and is now running for Avanza, a non-ideological party born from a split of the ID pretending to be ‘social democratic’.

* Meanwhile, María José Carrión, a minor official in the Correa administration who served as an Alianza PAIS constituent assemblywoman (2007-08) and legislator from Pichincha (2013-21, reelected in 2017 on the #2 spot on the list led by Jorge Yunda), has confirmed running as the mayoral candidate of AMIGO, a fake party which has changed hands three times since its registration two years ago. Carrión is constituting a tandem with Jacinto Espinoza, aka ‘Super Chinto’, a former football player and the AMIGO candidate for prefect of Pichincha, who has unsuccessfully ran for assemblyman for Pichincha in 2017 on the Alianza PAIS list led by Pabel Muñoz.

https://twitter.com/chinto_espinoza/status/1551631353342459904

* The AMIGO 2021 presidential candidate, Pedro José Freile, who has advocated fairly right-wing positions (opposing tax increases and trans women taking selfies in the nearby of the Quito cathedral) and is a signatory of the anti-Communist Madrid Charter, has negotiated with various minor parties to sponsor his candidacy as he has left AMIGO few months ago. He will be, illogically, the candidate of the Ecuadorian Socialist Party (PSE; just few years ago, it used Che Guevara pictures in its electoral propaganda), a choice with a strong potential for pissing up both PSE members and Freile small voting base (he ran in 2021 as an ‘anti-system’ candidate).

https://twitter.com/lahistoriaec/status/1553168641394368512

* Reportedly, Freile was negotiating with the PSC but the right-wing party, which is traditionally weak in the capital, has decided to go with another candidate, Patricio Alarcón, who has served until very recently as the president of the Chamber of Commerce of Quito.

* For its part, CREO is still undecided between Luz Elena Coloma, a CREO municipal councilor, and Juan Zapata, the current chairman of the Operating Committee for National Emergencies. Back in 2019, after having contemplating running for prefect of Pichincha for the right-wing SUMA, Zapata decided instead to run for an alliance between the ID, Democracia Sí (the party of Gustavo Larrea, a former interior minister under Correa criticized some fifteen years ago for his alleged ties with the FARC who has endorsed Lasso in the 2021 runoff) and VIVE, a local political movement labeling itself as center-left. Zapata then placed second with 20.7%, behind the Correísta candidate, Paola Pabón, who received 22.1% of the vote.

* Democracia Sí has decided to constitute an alliance with the PSP of former president Lucio Gutiérrez (elected as a leftist, governed as a right-winger) and the local Ahora movement (which was allied with CREO in 2019). The three-party alliance is considering it would be a good idea to further split the right-wing vote by running as candidate for mayor Andrés Páez. A former ID assemblyman, Páez was the running-mate of Lasso in the 2017 presidential election and is now advocating some fairly right-wing (if not far-right) positions, being notably the organizer of demonstrations to protest against the amnesty given to participants of the 2019 paro.

* Gustavo Baroja, the prefect of Pichincha between 2006 and 2019, is rumored to be the mayoral candidate of MOVER, the new name of Alianza PAIS. Coming from the ID, Baroja has been a loyal supporter of both Correa and Moreno and has inherited the ruins of Alianza PAIS when Moreno decided to stop pretending caring about the party.

* Even if his star has faded these recent months and in spite of him being less discussed in the medias, Xavier Hervas is considered as the probable candidate of the ID.

* Running as the candidate of the local Todos movement, Jessica Jaramillo, a legal adviser who led the charge for the removal of Yunda, may poach some Hervas 2021 voters.

Back in 2019, there were 19 candidates for mayor of Quito, of which only four received over 10% of the vote and seven polled under 1%.

Guayaquil

* The incumbent mayor, Cynthia Viteri (elected in 2019 after a long career on national level as a legislator and a two-time presidential candidate), has been renominated by the PSC with the hope to retain the municipality it is holding since 1992, a unique case of political hegemony in a major city of Ecuador. Viteri is however vulnerable due to the avalanche of scandals that has surrounded her administration, notably the 2020 deranged decision to illegally block the Guayaquil airport runway to prevent a plane to land in the city (the aircraft was supposedly full of passengers contaminated with COVID-19; I’m glad this decision enabled the city to be spared by the pandemics, oh wait a minute), overprices contracts awarded for aromatherapy services and the painting of literary quotations on the walls of Guayaquil and suspicions of favoritism in the municipality lands management benefiting to her then-husband. Viteri has decided to make a very aggressive campaign, attacking the central government for the problems in Guayaquil, trashing the journalists and internal opponents (talking about ‘kiss of Judas’ in one of her most unhinged discourse) for her own judicial problems and reactivating the old Guayaquil parochialism and the traditional detestation of the city for Quito (in the mold of Jaime Nebot’s recent demand for ‘federalism’ in Ecuador).

* Viteri will face Aquiles Álvarez, a businessman and the vice president of the Barcelona football club who, in spite of his background and lack of political experience, has been selected by the RC as its mayoral candidate. This caused some discontent among the RC rank-and-file members (at least on Twitter) with the ire directed at the party’s president, Marcela Aguiñaga, even if it is very hard to believe Correa hasn’t intervened in the choice. This is however pretty indicative of the difficulties of Correa’s party to find well-known candidates and its lack of local implantation (not different from other parties in that regard however).

* The populist anti-PSC vote will be however split as Jimmy Jairala, the host of a popular political interview radio show and a former prefect (2009-2019) of Guayas, is running as the candidate for his personal vehicle, the Democratic Center (CD). This will be the third bid of Jairala for the mayorship of Guayaquil with the CD leader having been accused by the RC of being a chimbador candidate that will hurt Álvarez and enable the reelection of Viteri.

Relations between the RC and the CD have significantly soured these last months, as both parties have different plans for the local elections. Jairala has just made official the termination of the UNES alliance between his party and Correa’s one, arguing of ‘unfulfilled commitments’ on behalf of the RC.

Nevertheless, Jairala’s own political past as a super-opportunist speaks from itself: a first run for mayor in Guayaquil in 2004 as the candidate of Abdalá Bucaram’s PRE; a successful election as prefect of Guayas in 2009 as the candidate of an alliance between the pro-business UNO and the PSP (defeating Correa’s own sister); a reelection in 2014 as the candidate of the newly formed CD and with the open support of Correa; the dropping of the alliance with Correa in 2016 to join the left-leaning National Agreement for Change that selected Paco Moncayo (ID) as its candidate in the 2017 presidential election; the subsequent betraying of Moncayo’s alliance to endorse Moreno in the runoff and ensure ministries in the Moreno administration for the CD; a second unsuccessful bid for mayor of Guayaquil in 2019 when he distanced himself from the by-then toxic Moreno government; the departure of the CD from the Moreno government in 2020 to conclude in the aftermath an alliance with Correa; and now the collapse of that latter alliance because of Jairala’s own municipal ambitions.

* Running as candidate for SUMA is Pedro Pablo Duart, a former head of the Guayaquil’s Department for Social Action and Education under the PSC administration of Jaime Nebot who later joined the Moreno administration to serve as a governor of Guayas.

* Possibly more dangerous as a chimbador candidate for Viteri is Cristina Reyes who may run either for the Guayaquil mayorship either for the Guayas prefecture. A blonde woman with a background as a TV journalist like Viteri, Reyes is currently serving as a member of the useless Andean Parliament after having been a PSC assemblywoman and a short-lived presidential candidate for Nebot’s party in 2020. Until few weeks ago, Reyes was the second vice president of the PSC, but she abruptly resigned and announced her departure from the party arguing of ‘major discrepancies’ with the PSC membership (read: she didn’t get the candidate nomination she demanded). She is now posturing as the victim of a harassment campaign organized by a ‘troll center’ ran by her former fellow PSC members.

https://twitter.com/periodicodeuna/status/1552281997216727042

Guayas Province

* The PSC has nominated as its candidate the incumbent prefect, Susana González, a clone of Viteri and Reyes (blonde and former TV journalist). Elected a deputy prefect in 2019, González ascended the prefecture in June 2020 when the incumbent prefect, Carlos Luis Morales (a former football player and a former member of the PRE and the CD), died from COVID-19 while investigated for the awarding of public hospitals contracts to various shady companies and individuals.

* The main challenger of González, with reasonable chances of success, will be Marcela Aguiñaga, a former environment minister under Correa and currently the president of the RC.

* The CD has nominated Héctor Vanegas, the (in)famous fedora lawyer whose brother Ricardo is serving as a Pachakutik assemblyman. Vanegas, who is also supported by the PSP and the PSE, has previously ran for prefect, assemblyman or municipal councilor for about a half-dozen of parties in fifteen years and tried several months ago to register a membership with the RC the last year, a move that was opposed by the party leadership after a massive uproar among Correísta bases. The ongoing feud between the CD and the RC is partly attributed to Vanegas’s unwillingness to drop his prefect bid in favor of Aguiñaga.

* The nomination of González has pissed off Nicolás Lapentti, 78, a member of the PSC’s old guard who has served as the prefect of Guayas between 1992 and 2009 and is also, anecdotally, the father of professional tennis players Nicolás and Giovanni Lapentti. Lapentti has consequently resigned from the party he has been a member for decades to join the newly registered People, Equality and Democracy (PID) who is running him as its candidate for prefect. The PID, a pseudo center-left fake party, is led by Arturo Moreno, a cousin of the former president making it the third registered party led by a relative of Lenín since 2019.

https://twitter.com/lahistoriaec/status/1549235496701886464

* Yet another PSC defector, Andrés Guschmer, a former football commentator elected a Guayaquil municipal councilor in 2019, is contemplating running for prefect, this time with the support of the Total Renovation Movement (RETO), a rebranded version of Juntos Podemos, the fake center-left party founded by Paúl Carrasco, a former prefect of Azuay who ran for president in 2021 and finished last out of sixteen candidates with an incredibly pathetic 0.2% of the vote. In spite (or because) having ran a pretty nasty xenophobic campaign vilifying Venezuelan migrants.

Durán

In that poorest suburb of Guayaquil, the administration of the incumbent mayor, Dalton Narváez, has been such a trainwreck he isn’t running for reelection. Instead the PSC has nominated Rodrigo Aparicio Arce who happens to be the cousin of his most serious rival, Alexandra Arce, the former mayor (2014-19) and the RC candidate. A loyal supporter of Correa, Arce is currently serving as an assemblywoman.

As if one family drama wasn’t enough, Mariana Mendieta, 66, the former PSC mayor (2000-08) once prosecuted for corruption, is running for the PSP; she is the mother of Dalton Narváez and, in her public statement announcing her departure from the PSC after almost forty years as a member, she trashed the administration of her son.

Minor candidates are apparently playing a weird game of musical chairs: Luis Chonillo (a former governor of Guayas in the Moreno administration), the ID candidate, was the CD candidate in 2019; José Solís, the CD candidate, was the candidate of the defunct Movimiento Ecuatoriano Unido (led by a brother of Lenín Moreno) in 2019; Leonidas Cevallas, the PSE candidate, was the candidate for Álvaro Noboa’s Adelante Ecuatoriano Adelante party in 2019; the candidate supported by Pachakutik, Pablo Ayala, has been elected a municipal councilor in 2019 for the CD.

Milagro

The PID is running as candidate for mayor of the third most populated city of Guayas, José Francisco Cevallos, a former football player and president of the Barcelona Sporting Club who has served as a minister for sport under Correa and as a governor of Guayas under Moreno.

Cuenca

In the third-most populated city of the country, the incumbent mayor Pedro Palacios (elected in 2019 on a left-leaning platform, one of the biggest surprise of the election as he was polled at 4%, when polled, and ended up with 28.1%) is now at odds with Yaku Pérez, his former ally in the fight to get mining prohibited in Cuenca. The former Pachakutik prefect of Azuay (elected in 2019, resigned in 2020 to run for president), whose political party Somos Agua has failed to get registration, is trying to build an alliance with Jefferson Pérez, a former athlete who won a gold medal in Atlanta 1996 Olympics and a 2019 candidate for mayor of Cuenca (considered as the front-runner but unexpectedly defeated by Palacios). Jefferson’s party, Renace, has never show particular interest for environmental questions and advocated in 2019 a clear pro-business platform full of illegible technobabble terminology (still trying to figure out what ‘polygons of social development’ are).

The aforementioned Paúl Carrasco (who served as prefect of Azuay between 2005 and 2018 and already unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Cuenca in 2019) could be the candidate of RETO while Marcelo Cabrera, 71, until recently the minister for transportation and public works, could once again run for mayor (having previously served as the city mayor in 2005-09 and 2014-19 and unsuccessfully ran for reelection in 2019; he was also the prefect of Azuay between 1996 and 2004) for his own personal party, Igualdad. Another political dinosaur has expressed some interest in running again for mayor of Cuenca: Fernando Cordero, 70, who has already served as mayor of Cuenca between 1995 and 2005 before starting a successful career on national level (notably as president of the National Assembly and defense minister under Correa).

To be continued…

[Sir John Johns]

Manabí

In that province, a stronghold of Correísmo, the incumbent RC prefect, Leonardo Orlando (elected in 2019), who previously served as the head of the tax administration under Correa will certainly face in his reelection bid the current (and term-limited) mayor of Portoviejo, Agustín Casanova (elected mayor in 2014 as the candidate of SUMA, reelected in 2019 for an alliance comprising the PSC and two local parties). Casanova is running a right-wing alliance between his newly formed personal vehicle (Caminantes), the PSC, SUMA and Unidad Primero, the party owned by Mariano Zambrano. A provincial prefect between 2005 and 2019, Mariano Zambrano, who has been regularly accused of corruption, was firstly elected for the PSC, then allied with Correa and Moreno and finally dumped this latter to constitute an alliance with the PSC in the 2019 elections.

Unrelated to Mariano is Jorge Zambrano who served several terms as the mayor of Manta (in 1996-2009 for the PSC, in 2014-19 for SUMA) and is considering running for prefect with either Avanza either AMIGO.

Massive outrage broke out in the ranks of the RC at the announcement by the party leadership of the endorsement of Jaime Estrada Medranda who will run for mayor of Manta as the candidate of an alliance between the RC and the local Sí Podemos movement owned by Estrada’s family. Currently the president of the Manta FC football club and an ephemeral professional football player (playing only about seven minutes during his short-lived career in the Manta FC when he still managed to score a goal), Estrada Medranda has been embroiled in a controversy two years ago when, as the vice-president of the Ecuadorian Football Federation (FEF), he staged a failed coup against the federation’s president with the things being settled in courts. More importantly, Estrada Medranda, who has no previous political experience, is the son of Jaime Estrada Bonilla, the founder of the Manta FC but also a veteran politician. Estrada the Elder has notably served as a DP congressman in the 1990s and as mayor of Manta between 2009 and 2019 (reelected in 2014 with the support of Correa and the Allianza PAIS). In 2019, he ran for prefect as the Sí Podemos-CREO candidate but refused to concede defeat to Orlando, the Correísta candidate, and launched lawsuits before the electoral courts to get the results overturned. Understandably, the Correísta bases aren’t particularly thrilled by the choice of Estrada Medranda but now, hilariously, Estrada Bonilla is campaigning for Orlando while the RC is campaigning for Estrada Bonilla’s son.

This later may actually be an improvement over the current mayor of Manta, Agustín Intriago, a young businessman elected in 2019 for his Movimiento Mejor Ciudad personal party who has been recently accused of having awarded public contracts to a company tied to Leandro Norero’s drug money laundering scheme.

In Portoviejo, the provincial capital, the designated heir of Casanova, Byron Joza (Caminantes) will notably face Clemente Vásquez, the former PSC prefect between 1992 and 1996 who again ran for prefect in 2019 for the PSC (with the support of Unidad Primero and Camino, Casanova’s first party) but is running this time, in the Portoviejo municipal race, for the PSE. The ID may nominated Mayra Perero, a municipal councilor elected in 2019 by that same PSC-Unidad Primero-Camino alliance that supported Vásquez’s bid for prefect. Among the candidates considered by the RC is José Miguel Mendoza who already ran for mayor in 2019 and placed second. He was then the candidate for an alliance between the ID, Avanza, the defunct Social Justice fake party and the Movimiento Acción Cívica de Hombres y Mujeres por el Trabajo y la Equidad (‘Civic Action Movement of Men and Women for Labor and Equity’, the word salad you have to make to obtain the fabulous MACHETE acronym; the first recipe included somewhere ‘Ethics’ making the acronym more accurate but, go figure, they dropped out that part).

In Tosagua, a rural canton, a Catholic priest, Richard García, has announced running for mayor with the support of the CD. The archbishopric of Portoviejo has however dismissed García’s allegations about having obtained an authorization from the Church to run for electoral office.

Esmeraldas

In that province, the incumbent prefect, Roberta Zambrano (PSC), whose election in 2019 put an end to a fourteen-year-long rule by the (officially) Marxist-Leninist MPD (later renamed UP), is going for reelection. She will be faced Linder Altafuya (UP) who was already briefly a prefect between 2018 and 2019. A more coherent choice for the UP which in 2019 has nominated Lenín Chica, a veteran opportunist politician who has been successively an influential member of Álvaro Noboa’s PRIAN, a failed CREO candidate for assemblyman and the director of the provincial party branch of Avanza.

https://twitter.com/lahistoriaec/status/1549450739369517058

In the homonym provincial capital, the candidate of the RC is Vicko Villacís, a choice that, again, sparked outrage among the Correísta base. Indeed, Villacís, has previously been the Democracia Sí candidate for provincial prefect in 2019 and for assemblyman in 2021. He also has made in 2018 disparaging comments about the Correa administration, calling it notably ‘the most corrupt government’. Villacís has posted a message in which he apologized for these past bad comments and asked Correa’s forgiveness.

https://twitter.com/VickoVillacisT/status/1549940661562007552

The incumbent mayor of Esmeraldas and former provincial prefect, Lucía Sosa (UP), is going for reelection and will faced, in addition to Villacís, a former fellow MPD member, Ernesto Estupiñán. This one has been the mayor of the city between 2000 and 2014 and is now running as the candidate for an ID-Pachakutik alliance. CREO has nominated as candidate for mayor Frickson Erazo, until recently a professional football player.

El Oro

In this coastal province, the incumbent prefect, Clemente Bravo, is running for reelection. Elected in 2019 as the candidate of his SUR local party with the support of the CD, Democracia Sí and Alianza PAIS, Bravo then defeated the incumbent prefect, Esteban Quirola (elected in 2014 for SUMA but seeking then reelection for an alliance between his SIII personal vehicle and CREO) as well as two former prefects: the aging Carlos Falquez (PSC) who, after a stint as a CFP member under Assad Bucaram, served as a prefect (1992-96) and a mayor of Machala (2005-14); and Montgomery Sánchez, the longtime provincial prefect between 1996 and 2014 who, after having been a member of the PRE, started his own local party, the MAR. Montgomery had allied with Correa in the late 2000s and early 2010s and served as an assemblyman in 2017-18 after having obtained in 2013 the election of his own son for that same office thanks to an alliance with Correa’s party.

All these people are, of course, running once again for office but Bravo and Falquez have reached an agreement to constitute a 'Bravo to the prefecture-Falquez to the Machala mayorship' ticket. Bravo is consequently the candidate for prefect for a PSC-SUR alliance which is supporting the 80-year-old Falquez in his attempt to recapture Machala, lost by his own son during his 2019 failed reelection bid. Quirola will possibly be the candidate for prefect of the CD after having been for a few days in 2020 the presidential candidate of the late Libertad es Pueblo (another party controlled by a brother of Moreno) until his expulsion for allegedly being a Correísta mole. The 71-year-old Montgomery Sánchez is running again for prefect for the MAR. Addtionaly another old-timer, Mario Minuche, who served as the mayor of Machala for the PRE between 1992 and 2005, has jumped in the race for prefect, this time with the support of the PSP. Until recently, Minuche was a member of the CD.

Los Ríos

In Los Ríos province, the candidate for the RC will be Humberto Alvarado, currently an assemblyman. Alvarado is the son of a deceased radio station owner and PSC-turn-Alianza PAIS congressman as well as the brother of Fernando and Vinicio Alvarado, two influential ministers under Correa and the owners of an advertising agency. Both brothers are currently charged for corruption and on the run (Vinicio, who is reportedly living in Venezuela, recently reemerged as an adviser for Gustavo Petro’s campaign).

The current PSC prefect, Johnny Terán Salcedo, is running for reelection while his son, Johnny Terán Barragán, is resigning his seat in the National Assembly to run for mayor of Babahoyo as the PSC incumbent mayor isn’t apparently running for reelection. Before his election as prefect, Terán Salcedo has served as the mayor of the city in 2003-09 and 2014-18.

The mayor of Buena Fe, Eduardo Mendoza, elected in 2014 as a candidate for Avanza and reelected in 2019 for a CREO-FE alliance, is planning to run for prefect, this time with the CD. He is the brother of Patricio Mendoza, himself a former mayor of Buena Fe (for the PRE, the predecessor of FE) and an unsuccessful candidate for prefect in 2019 for that same CREO-FE alliance. In December 2020, Patricio was murdered by hitmen while campaigning for a seat in the National Assembly for Avanza, a death considered as probably politically motivated. Patricio was replaced on that party’s list by his nephew and Eduardo's son, Eduardo Mendoza Hurtado, who has been elected an assemblyman in February 2021.

Leandro Ullón, a former PSP mayor of Mocache, is also running for prefect of Los Ríos as the candidate of an ID-Pachakutik alliance.

It also has been announced that Galo Lara will run for mayor of Quevedo. A controversial rightist political figure once charged for murder (he has always claimed it was political persecution on behalf of the Correa administration) who has ran for prefect in 2019 as the candidate of the PSP and planned a failed legislative campaign in 2020 for his unregistered Gente Libre (GL like the initial letters of Galo Lara; Ecuadorian politicians are sometimes lacking creativity) proposing notably the castration for of child abusers. The alliance supporting Lara: ID-Pachakutik. Yuck.

Cotopaxi

The Pachakutik campaign isn’t starting well as the indigenous party’s incumbent prefect, Jorge Guamán has just been arrested over allegations of participation in a corruption scheme involving notably a Cuban businessman. Pachakutik and the CONAIE are predictably denouncing a politically motivated decision. It nevertheless doesn’t help Pachakutik whose internal primaries have ended in a dispute and allegations of irregularities as the victory of Arturo Ugsha is today still challenged by former assemblywoman Lourdes Tibán (whose husband is incidentally defending Guamán in the corruption case).

Like in 2019, former Pachakutik prefect César Umajinga (in office between 2000 and 2012 when removed from office by the provincial council on the grounds of corruption, a move widely seen as orchestrated by the Correa government) will be the candidate for prefect for SUMA.

[Sir John Johns]

Xavier Hervas has announced he is leaving the ID under the pretext on ‘not repeating the same political practices’. He seems to also discard a candidacy for mayor of Quito next year. Hervas’ departure is however happening two weeks ago after the CNE has approved the removal from the ID presidency of Guillermo Herrera, an ally of Hervas, and proclaimed Enrique Chávez, elected on last April by a self-convened Congress, as the legit president of the party. Chávez is considered as somewhat close to the newest generation of ID politicians like assemblymen Alejandro Jaramillo and Johanna Moreira (both excluded from the ID caucus). The two rival factions were supposed to have buried the hatchet pending the internal selection of candidates for the local elections. This ‘ceasefire’ was made in order to prevent a legal challenge and a potential disqualification of the party’s lists: Herrera, who is a term-limited prefect of Carchi (in office since 2012), is planning to run for mayor of Tulcán.

It should be noted that, while Hervas had been selected the ID presidential candidate in August 2020 (after the party’s initial choice, Inty Grønneberg, an engineer and entrepreneur in high-tech sector, had declined to run), he only became a member of the party in March 2021. Hervas is the fourth 2021 presidential candidate to leave the party that supported its candidacy after Yaku Pérez (Pachakutik), Ximena Peña (Alianza PAIS) and Pedro José Freile (AMIGO), ignoring the farcical candidacies of Carlos Sagnay (Fuerza Ecuador) and Geovanny Andrade (Ecuadorian Union) who were both expelled even before election day. This is once again pretty indicative of the debility of political parties in Ecuador.

[Sir John Johns]

Some updates on the 'internal democracy' processes in the parties to select the candidates for 2023 local elections.

Pichincha

In Quito, Andrés Páez is confirmed to run for the PSP and with the endorsement of Democracia Sí and the Ecuadorian Democratic Action (ADE), a local party. Meanwhile the PSC candidate, Patricio Alarcón, has received the endorsement of the MIOS (Movimiento Incluyente de Oportunidades y Equidad Social), another local party that has been accused of enjoying ties with fascist/neo-nazi groups. The ID candidate will be Inty Grønneberg, the party's first choice for presidential candidate in 2020, while CREO has decided to go with Luz Elena Coloma. Jorge Yunda has been confirmed as the candidate of a weird alliance between Pachakutik, Arturo Moreno's PID and MOVER, the rebranded Alianza PAIS. Yet another candidate has entered the race as the CD has nominated Omar Cevallos, currently serving as a municipal councilor; Cevallos was elected in 2019 for Concertación, the defunct party of César Montúfar who is supposed to stand against everything embodied by Jairala.

Guayas


In the province of Guayas, the PSE has officially endorsed the CD ticket made up by Héctor Vanegas (candidate for prefect) and Jimmy Jairala (candidate for mayor of Guayaquil) with Vanegas's running mate being Noris Arroyave, a radio journalist with tattoed arms who is working on Jairala's radio talk show Un Café con JJ. The CD's top candidate on the list for municipal councilor in Guayaquil's first district will be Carla Sala, a dancer and once the presenter of a popular TV variety show who has never previously ran for office.

https://twitter.com/lahistoriaec/status/1553568029597990913

Vanegas has already started to sink his own campaign as he had to apologize after a spectacularly moronic and misogynist proclamation he made during a meeting. He then explained that when visiting the barrios, 'the females go out and this aren't the kerchiefs they are taking off but their pants'.

https://twitter.com/hectorvanegasdr/status/1553549201442734080

Meanwhile, Nicolás Lapentti, the former PSC prefect, is, in additon of the PID, also supported by the PSP and AMIGO and will have as running-mate María Fernanda Ríos, a tecnocumbia singer/TV actress/former juror for Ecuador's Got Talent who has absolutely no political experience. The CREO candidate is Francesco Tabacchi, a businessman who is also the brother of Doménica Tabacchi, a former Teleamazonas journalist and once the PSC deputy mayor of Guayaquil under Jaime Nebot.

In Milagro, the municipal race will see the former football player and PID candidate José Francisco Cevallos being opposed by his own son, Francisco Andrés Cevallos, who is running for a 'mega-alliance' of five parties (and probably not much active members in Milagro) between the CD, CREO, Construye, RETO and the Renovación local movement after having unsuccessfully ran in 2021 for a seat of provincial assemblyman as a candidate for an Alianza PAIS-Construye alliance. Also running are a RC candidate, Pedro Solines, who previously served under Correa as a superintendent for banks and insurances while the 2019 Correísta candidate, Edison Guaranga, is this time running for the UP. The mayorship of Milagro is currently held by the PSC but, as the incumbent mayor Francisco Asán Wonsang is term-limited, it is his deputy mayor and own daughter, Daniela Asán Torres, who will run for Jaime Nebot's party.

Azuay

Former prefect of Azuay and leader of RETO, Paúl Carrasco, will be the candidate for the post of mayor of Cuenca for an alliance between RETO, the CD, CREO and PID. He will faced Jefferson Pérez (Renace) who is officially supported by Yaku Pérez who, after initial reports he will run for a rural councilor in Cuenca for Renace, has indicated he will after all not running (as Renace is only registered as a cantonal movement, it can't field candidates for province-level office, including provincial prefect, the former job of Yaku). Also ultimately not running is Fernando Cordero who has indicated been offered the spot for mayor of Cuenca by both Marcelo Cabrera's local movement (Cabrera is running for prefect) and the RC.

This latter party seems to struggle finding candidates in a province that used to be one of its strongholds but where it has no party infrastructure remaining. The name of the RC candidate for mayor of Cuenca (providing there will be one) is still unknown while the candidate for prefect is Juan Cristóbal Lloret, currently serving in the National Assembly. Not having a candidate in the third most populated city of the country is obviously reflecting badly on the RC but it should be mentioned that CREO will not have a candidate for mayor of Guayaquil, Ecuador's economic hub and the birthplace of Lasso...

Santa Elena

Two out of three legislators from Santa Elena province are resigning their seat for running in the local elections. Independent assemblyman Daniel Noboa, the son of Álvaro Noboa, is running for prefect as the candidate of SUMA while the independent assemblywoman María del Carmen Aquino will be the candidate for mayor of the city of Santa Elena for an alliance between the local 'Believing in Our People Peninsular Provincial Movement' and the RC. Decidedly a politician with strong principles, Aquino, who had been elected in 2021 thanks to an alliance between another local party and the PSC, is currently seating in the BAN caucus but has voted in last June in favor of the impeachment of President Lasso.

[Sir John Johns]

https://twitter.com/cendemocratico/status/1556344218603458561

And now the Democratic Center (CD) has officially dis-endorsed and withdrew its support to Héctor Vanegas because of the lawyer's sexist comments. The CD has announced it will consequently have no candidate for the prefecture as the period of 'internal democracy' process to select candidates is officially over. But Vanegas is still in the race as the Ecuadorian Socialist Party (PSE) is maintaining its support to the fedora lawyer in spite of the party self-defining itself as 'the first feminist and ecologist party of Ecuador'. Imagine having even less principles that Jimmy Jairalá! Anyway, the candidacy of Vanegas may still been under threat as his running-mate, Noris Arroyave who is also the vice president of the CD, is withdrawing, and Vanegas has now to find somebody else to run for vice prefect on his ticket with the possibility it could be rejected by the National Electoral Council.

Bar a last-minute surprise, Cristina Reyes is also out of the race for mayor of Guayaquil or prefect of Guayas having found no party to support her or having renounced because of the nasty attacks coming from her former PSC fellow members while Santiago Guarderas is apparently not running for reelection as mayor of Quito (considering his approvals, he would certainly have been defeated). Pachakutik will also not keep the prefecture of Azuay it gained in 2019 with Yaku Pérez as it totally messed its primaries up with accusations of irregularities and internal feuds leading to the decision to not field a candidate neither for prefect of Azuay neither for mayor of Cuenca.

[Sir John Johns]

https://twitter.com/FiscaliaEcuador/status/1558841722272157696?cxt=HHwWgMC40bGSj...

Violence in Guayaquil has reached a new high as an explosion of criminal origin has blasted Cristo del Consuelo, an impoverished barrio in Letamendi parish, in the southern part of the city. The explosion left five inhabitants dead (two immediately killed and three deceased in the hospital) and sixteen wounded. It also destroyed eight houses and two cars and made that part of Cristo del Consuelo looking like a war zone (witnesses have compared the explosion to the ones of the Russian bombings in Ukraine they see on television). According to the police, two men on motorcycle thrown a bag containing a 'considerable' amount of explosives at a cafeteria, just after gunfire had been heard. Cristo del Consuelo, where the most important Catholic religious parade of the city is taking place each year, has turned into a hotbed of drug trafficking in spite of a social housing program launched under the Correa administration and the construction in 2018 of a community police unit.

While bomb attacks have been previously used by drug gangs, this is the first time the target is a residential sector and not a public building (police stations, prisons, the Montecristi radar station built to detect illegal flights and severely damaged by an explosion only eleven days after its commissioning).

The interior minister is accusing the Los Tiguerones drug gang for the explosion and has labeled the blast as a 'terrorist act' and 'a declaration of war against the state'. Nevertheless, the measures that have been announced to address organized criminality in Guayaquil are pretty indicative of the helplessness of the government to tackle the problem: a $10,000 reward for any information related to the crime perpetrators and the proclamation of yet another state of emergency in Guayaquil. Nothing has been announced to address the underlying causes of the rise in crime: poverty, lack of economic opportunities, corruption and infiltration by organized crime of state institutions like the police, the justice and the army, overcrowding of the prison system, under-funding of the judicial, police and prison systems to name a few.

Predictably, the PSC mayor Cynthia Viteri immediately used the deadly attack to trash the Lasso administration and blame it for the rise in criminality with a particularly harsh statement denouncing the inaction of the central government, claiming that 'criminal gangs have become a government within the government in Ecuador and concluding with a brutal 'who is calling the shots here: the organized crime or an enslaved government?'

Francisco Jiménez, the government minister, answered with a similarly offensive statement requesting Viteri 'to take action, for the first time, with responsibility and without demagoguery' and reminding the inconvenient fact that the PSC has been in charge of Guayaquil since three decades, hence why Viteri 'shouldn't commit the absurdity of so trivially evading [her] responsibility'.

https://twitter.com/panchojimenezs/status/1558900893977903108

Remember, CREO and the PSC were allied just eighteen months ago.

[Sir John Johns]

President Lasso has announced the eight questions that will be put to referendum before or on 5 February 2023, the latter date being the day the local elections and the elections of the members of the Council for Citizen Participation and Social Control (CPCCS) will be hold. The Constitutional Court has still to review the questions in the next twenty days to approve them. In addition to these eight questions that, if approved, will all amended the constitution, it has been announced that two proposals that aren’t needing a constitutional amendment will also be put to vote in a consulta (in practice, the ten questions will all appeared on the same ballot).

Questions have been divided by the government into three categories:

- ‘amendments to promote citizen security’
- ‘amendments to strengthen democracy’
- ‘amendments to protect the environment’


Amendments ‘to promote citizen security’

#1 Enabling a ‘complementary support’ of the armed forces to help the police fighting organized crime

If passed, it would enable the army to assist the police to fight insecurity and organized crime which is currently only possible during states of exception. According to the government, it is necessary to curb the current explosion of drug-related criminality even if the experiments of militarization of the fight against drug trafficking haven’t been a tremendous success in countries like Mexico or Colombia. Even more, there is strong concerns such amendment would enable military crackdown on social protests, especially when the government rhetoric has been to accuse without any proof the indigenous movement of being financed by drug trafficking. Finally, as demonstrated by the Don Naza scandal or the arrest of eight members of the Navy for cocaine trafficking last month, the armed forces as much as the police aren’t immune to infiltration by criminal elements.


#2 Enabling the extradition of Ecuadorian citizens accused of having committed crimes related to transnational organized crime

This one would amend the 2008 Constitution that is currently prohibiting extradition, regardless of the crime committed. Such prohibition already appeared in the constitutions passed in 1967, 1978 and 1998. According to the government, if passed, it would reinforce cooperation between the Ecuadorian justice and justice of foreign countries (in first the United States but also Colombia) in regard of matters related to international drug, weapons or human trafficking. Constitutional experts are however considering that such change could only be passed through the convening of a Constituent Assembly while the Colombian experience in regard to extradition of drug traffickers to the United States has been mixed and the measure is certainly not the magic bullet to solve the problem of organized criminality.


#3 Guaranteeing the autonomy of the Attorney General’s Office (Fiscalía) which will select, review, train, promote or sanction prosecutors through a newly created Prosecution Council

The Attorney General’s Office is currently dependent of the Judicature Council, currently paralyzed by a turf war and under the threat of being partly removed by the National Assembly. The plan of the government is to transfer duties currently assigned to the Judicature Council (selection, reviewing, training, promotion or sanctioning of prosecutors) directly to the Attorney General’s Office for purportedly enabling the speedy hiring and training of new servants to address the critical ongoing shortage in prosecutors: it is estimated that there is currently lacking 573 prosecutors and that a rate of 8 prosecutors for each 100,000 inhabitants is necessary to make the justice working correctly when the current rate is only 4.7 prosecutors (down from 5 in 2018) for each 100,000 inhabitants. Also according to the government it will also make the Fiscalía free from internal and external interference (good luck with that).

This however strongly sounds as a new metida de mano to retake control of the judiciary, just few days after the National Assembly has failed by only five votes to remove three members of the Judicature Council, accused by UNES assemblymen of breach of duty in the selection of judges. The vote took place among accusations and counter-accusations of pressures and vote buying on behalf of the Judicature Council, the government and the recently reinstated president of the Court of Justice, Iván Saquicela (who has been recently at the center of a controversy over an alleged meeting he had last month in New Jersey with Jaime Nebot and J.J. Franco, the right-hand-man of Nebot and currently a justice fugitive due to his suspected involvement in the corruption scheme of former comptroller-general Pablo Celi).

It also took place while, in early August, a judge of Portoviejo bestowed a new habeas corpus to Jorge Glas but also Daniel Salcedo (the imprisoned political operative linked to Abdalá Bucaram and convicted in the hospitals corruption case) only to see the decision being annulled for irregularities. The judge was subsequently arrested by the police after the Judicature Council had nullified just few days before the issuing of the habeas corpus the abandonment of charges against the magistrate in an unrelated case of prevarication.

The list of legislators who voted in favor of the removal of the Judicature Council members are unsurprisingly including the whole UNES and PSC caucuses but only a half of the Pachakutik rebel group as well as three members of the Pachakutik ‘organic’ caucus, nine ID legislators led by Wilma Andrade (who had voted previously against the impeachment of Lasso) and various independents like the president of the National Assembly, Virgilio Saquicela, the alternate of Daniel Noboa or Bruno Segovia, the associate of Yaku Pérez. Noticeably, the rebel faction of ID (led by the ‘rising stars’ Alejandro Jaramillo and Johanna Moreira), which had previously voted for removing Lasso, has this time choose to abstain and so was Dalton Bacigalupo, a member of the ID old guard, who has publicly accused Iván Saquicela of lobbying to get the three members of the Judicature Council removed.

Further controversy arose when President Lasso, just few days before the vote, announced he was dropping the complaints for corruption he had filed against five Pachakutik assemblymen, especially as the five legislators later abstained on the Judicature Council impeachment vote, just the five missing votes to enable the impeachment to succeed… Nevertheless, the Fiscalía has made clear the investigation against the five legislators is still ongoing while the impeachment vote could resume at the reconvening of the National Assembly plenary on 26 September.

In regard to the proposed amendment, the Fiscalía has indicated it is supporting an autonomy of the institution but also expressed reservations about the creation of a Prosecution Council it considers as being actually an obstacle to real autonomy.



Amendments ‘to strengthen democracy’


#4 Reducing the number of assemblymen by changing the formula to determine the number of legislators to adopt the following criteria:

* 1 assemblyman by province and 1 additional provincial assemblyman for each 250,000 inhabitants
* 2 national assemblymen for each 1 million of inhabitants
* 1 assemblyman for each 500,000 inhabitants residing aboard

The National Assembly is currently made up by a fixed number of 15 assemblymen (‘national assemblymen’) elected on a national list; 116 assemblymen (‘provincial assemblymen’) elected on a provincial list in provinces or electoral districts for the most-populated provinces with a fixed minimum number of two seats by province and additional ones established according to the census results; and a fixed number of 6 assemblymen (‘assemblymen from abroad’) elected to represent Ecuadorians residing in foreign countries.

If passed, the number of legislators will decrease for the current 137 (and projected 152 in the next election if the current formula stays in place) to 121 with the number of national assemblymen increasing to 36, the one of provincial assemblymen decreasing to 83 and the one of assemblymen from aboard being reduced to 2. These numbers aren’t however set in stone as a new census should be organized later this year (twelve years after the latest one).

The proposal is supposed to improve the representativeness and the credibility of the National Assembly, enable voters to exercise a citizen control over the legislators and reduce the financial cost of the parliament. But the problem with the National Assembly isn’t the number of legislators and critics have already pointed that the main impact of the new formula will be to reduce the political weight of the less populated provinces which are also often the most rural ones and the ones with the largest indigenous populations. So much for improving the representativeness. And color me skeptical over such proposal actually improving the whole Ecuadorian political culture.


#5 Requiring that political movements have a minimum number of members corresponding to 1.5% of the total registered voters in the electoral jurisdiction and have their membership register being periodically audited by the National Election Council

Touching here a major issue of Ecuadorian politics. The prerequisite for a political movement to have a membership corresponding to at least 1.5% of the registered electorate is already in force but there is no audit conducted by the CNE to verify political parties are still meeting the requirement to keep registration.

According to the CNE’s official statistics, 4.6 million of Ecuadorian citizens are currently members of one of the 272 existing political movements (a large majority being provincial or local ones) which accounts for 35% of registered voters. This may be a surprising high number considering how sh**tty and corrupt is your average Ecuadorian political party.

Well, it turns out that your average Ecuadorian political party is even more sh**tty and corrupt than you may think as demonstrated by this kind of newspaper article:

How can I know if I am enrolled in a political party?

It is detailing the pretty complicated way for an Ecuadorian citizen to check where he is enrolled in a political party or not (you have to physically go to the headquarters of the CNE in Quito or its provincial offices – one by province) and to obtain a certificate of ‘apoliticism’ proving he isn’t the member of a political party, a prerequisite to hold certain jobs or to run for a seat in the CPCCS.

Because, as put mildly by El Universo (‘many voters may be unaware their names have been used and are members of any political party’), a significant number of signatures are used without the consent of its owner or even simply forged as a way for political movements to be registered with the CNE (see also this 2019 article that led one of its authors to discover her signature had been used without her knowledge bar less her consent eight times and by five different parties during a political movement registration process).

A major scandal of forged signatures broke out in July 2012 when thousands of persons discovered by using the request system of the CNE website that their signatures had been used without their consent by political organizations of all stripes. Nevertheless, the investigations over the forgeries went nowhere and concluded, after seven years, with the sentencing of four persons while the CNE’s system to check your party registration quickly went offline on the pretext of right to privacy.

The extent of the trafficking and forgery of signatures remains unknown but a former CNE member claimed that half of the registered national parties haven’t the requisite number of valid signatures (there are also rumors about the resale of signatures collection belonging to political movements that have been deregistered due to not meeting the requirements in terms of minimum electoral support), an allegation hard to discard when you remember that in the last presidential election twelve candidates received less than 3% of the valid votes. Furthermore, it is pretty obvious that, in a context of deep distrust of political parties, political movements like Unión Ecuatoriana, Ecuatoriano Unido, Justicia Social, Fuerza Compromiso Social (when led by Espinel), Libertad es Pueblo, the newly registered PID and, of course, AMIGO, which are all organizations without a platform, without an ideology, without a defined political orientation and even, sometimes, without an identified leadership, have obtained the registration only thanks to forged signatures obtained one way or another (on a side note, the then head of the verification of the signatures in the CNE interviewed in 2019 by La Historia is named Arturo Moreno and is apparently a relative of the former president; this may explained a thing or two).

If passed, the CNE would be required to ‘modernize its systems to enable the verification of its members and set up an electronic platform that would enable each citizen to consult his membership status, guaranteeing the right to protection of private data’.

While this is a laudable effort to address a particularly sorry situation, it should be noted that the intentions of the government regarding the CNE are not free from critics. Aparicio Caicedo, one of the main presidential advisers, has been accused last month by a member of the CNE of having interfered in the process to approve or reject candidacies for the election of the next CPCCS.

Relatedly, Caicedo has already been the center of a scandal of political interference after the leaking by Teleamazonas of audio recordings in which he is heard demanding Raúl González, the newly appointed superintendent for banks to resign. González was included on the three-name list sent by Lasso to the CPCCS for filling the position and was selected as the superintendent after the favored candidate of the presidency had been unexpectedly disqualified over lack of formal qualification. According to the president of the CPCCS, who voted against the approval of González unlike the majority of the institution, the new superintendent is unfit to fulfill his duties to conflict of interests as he is currently also the legal representative of two financial institutions in a process of liquidation. Anyway, he was still sworn in by the opposition-controlled assembly amidst accusations he was a Correísta and after a judicial decision has ruled his selection as being irregular and has demanded the president to sent a new three-name list to the CPCCS, something Lasso immediately did. The appointment of González has since been be canceled but the case will now go into justice and probably be settled by the Constitutional Court. Imagine being a political leader with a long experience in banking sector and that you still managed to produce such a legal and political cluster just because the list of nominees for superintendent for banks that you sent is only made up by unqualified people and persons tied to the opposition. Leading to the next proposal...


#6 Removing from the CPCCS the ability to designate authorities and give it back to the National Assembly

The first intent of Lasso was, as promised during the campaign, to abolish the CPCCS altogether, but as it requires the convening of a Constituent Assembly, he chose instead to strip the body from its main duty. A duty it has been proved largely unable to fulfill, the consequence of internal feuds, dismissal of several of its members (and awaiting an upcoming impeachment proceedings against the whole current membership) and interference from the presidency, the National Assembly and the justice.

While the government is presenting this as a way to ‘eliminate politicking and manipulation in the selection of the authorities’, it is a way to reinforce the powers of the president as, I understand it, the list of nominees will be directly sent to the National Assembly by the presidency without being reviewed by the CPCCS, giving more leverage of horse-trading with the political parties represented in the legislature. The text attached to the question is also including transitory provisions that will declare as null the ongoing competitive examination processes and gave the president the right to designate temporary appointees to fulfill positions vacant at the time of the referendum until the designation of permanent appointees.

This is also rising the point of electing new members of the CPCCS as, if the proposal is approved, they will be left with largely meaningless attributions (‘promotion of citizen participation and social control in the matters of public interest’). What the point of wasting money to summon a nationwide election for such a pointless institution?



Amendments ‘to protect the environment’

#7 Adding a water protection subsystem to the state-run National System for Protected Areas

The proposal, if approved, will include the so-called areas of water protection (water sources considered as being of public interest) into the National System for Protected Areas (SNAP) in charge of guaranteeing the conservation of biodiversity and preserving the ecological functions in protected areas. Concerns have already been expressed over the inclusion of the water protection in the SNA as it will add new duties to the already underfinanced and understaff agency. Critics have be also made about the fact that Ecuador has already pledged to the international community to protect water sources making the whole proposal redundant with the country’s international commitments.


#8 Providing financial compensations regulated by the state to individuals, communities, peoples and nationalities for their support in the generation of environmental services

According to the government, if passed it will enable the creation and the development of payment for ecosystem services (PES) to provide incentives (financial or not) to groups or individuals involved in nature protection (‘cash for conservation’).



The general consensus seems to be that referendum will be more on the Lasso administration than on the proposals themselves with the ones related to criminality being the less likely to be rejected (but not necessary a victory for Lasso on the long run as voters will then expect quick results on the front of insecurity). In any case, they are putting the opposition parties into an uncomfortable position, as it force the PSC, which is advocating a heavy-hand approach in security matters to side with the government, while reinforcing the narrative of the UNES and Pachakutik being in cahoots with criminals as they are expected to oppose the government’s proposals.

[Sir John Johns]

To be added on the eight questions (providing the Constitutional Court didn’t ruled some of them as unconstitutional), there could be a ‘surprise’ question to be put, apparently, on a different ballot: the question on the prohibition of oil extraction in the Yasuní park, pushed since 2014 by the YASunidos grassroots movement.

https://twitter.com/Yasunidos/status/1567262438004822022

Indeed, the Electoral Dispute Tribunal (TCE) has acknowledged the conclusions of a 2019 report that established that the YASunidos have gathered the required number of signatures and that the CNE had violated in 2014 the rights to citizens’ participation by massively and irregularly nullifying thousands of signatures to prevent the holding of the popular initiative referendum. As a consequence, it has ordered the CNE to issue a certification establishing that the minimum number of required signatures have been reached and that the referendum process should now proceed.

The next step is the reviewing by the Constitutional Court to decide of the constitutionality of the proposal with the major problem the question is about to keep oil of the Yasuní in the ground indefinitely while oil exploitation is now underway since 2016… If the proposal is somehow accepted, this will be the first one based on popular initiative put to referendum in Ecuador, four years after the first successful recall process of an elected official (the mayor of Loja in 2018).

[Sir John Johns]

https://twitter.com/FerminVaca/status/1573494416530096144?cxt=HHwWoICylbm1ltYrAA...

President Lasso has just sacked the interior minister, Patricio Carrillo (a police general holding the reconstituted Interior Ministry since last March), removed two police generals and demanded the resignation of the whole police leadership in the wake of the scandal surrounding the murder of María Belén Bernal.

A 34-year-old lawyer, Bernal has been in all likelihood murdered by strangulation by her own husband, Lt. Germán Cáceres (a police instructor) on 11 September in a dormitory of the Quito Police Training School (Escuela Superior de Policía, ESP). The body of Bernal has only been found off ten days later in a wood of northern Quito. In spite of contradictions in his testimony and the discovery of blood spots in his ESP room, Cáceres was left free to leave the office of the prosecutor who decided to not put him in pre-trial detention. The police instructor is currently on the run and seek by the justice.

The investigation and revelations in the press have uncovered a series of dysfunctions in the ESP, the police and the justice administrations in the case and pointed to possible complicity inside the ESP leadership. Among other aberrations: the night before the murder, Cáceres had been exempted from duty by one of the now removed police generals who gave instead him an authorization to play football in a police team; nevertheless, Cáceres instead went to a party given by one of his colleagues in an apartment outside the ESP in spite of him not allowed to leave the police school building; he there got heavily drunk and had a motorcycle accident while coming back to the ESP; neither the authorization to play football nor the absence from duty of Cáceres nor the motorcycle accident were reported to the ESP superiors (have they even noticed?); Bernal entered the ESP dormitories without an authorization; Cáceres was able to walk away the dormitories with the body of her wife rolled inside blankets and to leave the ESP at the wheel of his deceased wife’s car without any problem; no psychiatric evaluation of Cáceres has been conducted before appointing him a police instructor.

As put by a criminal lawyer, Cáceres evaded three times his arrest: in flagrante delicto in the ESP premises; when he was enable to leave freely the prosecutor’s office; when he managed to evade a police surveillance ordered when evidences were mounting against him.

https://twitter.com/KarolNorona/status/1572761358357172225?cxt=HHwWgsC4leyHydMrA...

Protests have been staged in front of police stations in various cities of the country by feminist organizations and relatives of Bernal to demand justice and force the government to act on the question of violence against women. According to the Fundación Aldea which has published a report on the matter early this month, 206 femicides have been recorded in Ecuador since the beginning of the year.

The Bernal case is of course happening at a worse moment for the government which has previously had to deal with the Don Naza scandal (involving this time the army) and is intending to insist on internal security matters in the upcoming referendum campaign. It also sealed the fate of Patricio Carrillo, who was already heavily criticized for his management of the June indigenous protests and was facing an impending impeachment proceedings in the National Assembly. Carrillo didn’t helped his case with a controversy over him having allegedly went on holiday in the middle of the search for Bernal’s body (he said he was actually went to the wedding of his daughter) and declarations describing the murder of a woman in a police school as ‘a crime of passion’ that was ‘unplanned’ and ‘an act, human, irrational, but it is human’.

For his part, the secretary for national security Diego Ordóñez also made insensitive comments about the necessity of ‘protecting the institutional prestige’ of the police, in an attempt to negate the structural problems and dysfunctions in the police and its ‘closing of ranks’ mind even when it is for covering up a crime committed by one of its member and to reduce the murder of Bernal to a simple isolated case. Such comment was rebuked by the mother of Bernal (in yet another PR disaster for the government) who declared she ‘doesn’t care about ‘institutionality but about rights’ and remind that ‘the State has to guarantee the [women’s] rights’.

And, as if it wasn’t enough, on 19 September, Édgar Escobar, a prosecutor specialized in cases of violence, murders or drug trafficking (including the last November massacre in Littoral Penitentiary, a case of bribery connected to the Isspol scandal and the recent bomb attack in a poor neighborhood of Guayaquil), has been shot dead by hit killers on motorbike just in front of the prosecutor’s office in Guayaquil downtown while the city is under a state of exception. The arrested suspects are aged of respectively 16 and 19. This is the fourth murder of a justice official since the beginning of the year after the murder of a prosecutor in Manta in May, of a prosecutor in Babahoyo in August and the assassination of a judge in Lago Agrio ten days thereafter.

[Sir John Johns]

The new Interior Minister appointed by Lasso is Juan Zapata, a 53-year-old retired lieutenant colonel in the National Police who notably organized the ‘Blue Hearts’ road safety campaign consisting in painting a blue heart on the road on the location of deadly vehicle accidents. After a retirement from the police in 2013, Zapata has served as the official in charge of safety and disaster management in the municipality of Quito under Mayor Mauricio Rodas before unsuccessfully ran for prefect of Pichincha in February 2019 as the candidate of an alliance between the ID, the Democracia Sí movement and Vive, a local party; he placed second behind the Correísta candidate with 20.7% of the vote. Since 2020, Zapata was serving as the general director of the ECU 911 emergency system and as the head of the national Emergency Operations Committee (COE), a body notably in charge of responding to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The suitability of the appointment of Zapata, a former policeman, to a post in which his main task will be to overhaul reforms of the national police and address the corporatism of the police institution has been already questioned. Also criticized has been his tenure under President Moreno and the widely despised minister for government, María Paula Romo, accused of breaches of human rights during the October 2019 protests.

https://twitter.com/lahistoriaec/status/1574496452641816577
Another problem is that the people in the government entrusted with the fight against gender-based violence are uniformly male, a clear step backwards comparing to the Correa and Moreno administrations which made serious efforts to increase the number of women in the government. After the resignations of Mae Montaño, Alexandra Vela or even Ximena Garzón or Bernarda Ordóñez, the Lasso administration is additionally lacking a high-profile female minister and has become even more of a rich white boys club.

https://twitter.com/ECUADORCHEQUEA/status/1574442200821207048

Finally, apart of more financing and dialogue with feminist groups, the 'concrete' measures announced by Lasso in a conference held in the ESP to address the issue of gender-based violence and crimes committed by policemen are only symbolic and very unconvincing: the promise to demolish the ESP building (now widely referred to as ‘Castle Grayskull’ in the medias) where Bernal has been murdered and to built ‘in honor of the women’ a new structure ‘with more light’ and the proposal to illuminate Carondelet Palace in purple (he previously did the same with rainbow colors to celebrate sexual diversity).


Yesterday, at the opening of the trial of Leonidas Iza for ‘paralysis of public services’, the judge has declared the nullity of the charges against the leader of the CONAIE. According to the judge, the arrest of Iza happened while tracked by the police since several days making the qualification of the whole case as flagrant delicto inadmissible. Finally, the judge decided to remove the precautionary measures and the prohibition of leaving Ecuador’s territory ordered against Iza while still leaving the door opened for a new trial providing the Attorney General’s Office piece together enough evidences to form the basis for new charges against Iza.

It should be also mentioned that, while the dialogue roundtables organized between the government and the indigenous organizations has failed to produce any concrete result so far, Iza has suffered a setback inside the indigenous movement last month when the candidate he supported for the presidency of the Ecuarunari (the highlands’ regional affiliate of the CONAIE) for the 2022-2025 term, a former minor official in the Correa administration, has been defeated (300 vs. 430 votes) by Alberto Ainaguano, a representative of the tiny Kichwa-speaking Chibuleo people (living in Tungurahua province, central Sierra). The new president of the Ecuarunari, installed on 16 September, is intending to advance the questions of bilingual and intercultural education, defend the indigenous collective rights and encourage the speaking of Kichwa language by younger generations.

[Sir John Johns]

Two other prison massacres have happened in the last days, one in the prison of Latacunga on 3 and 4 October that led to the deaths of 16 inmates and one in the Littoral Penitentiary of Guayaquil on 6 October during which 13 inmates were killed.
https://twitter.com/KarolNorona/status/1578511341366968320
Since 2021, some 401 inmates have been killed during the nine prison massacres that have took place during that period. A number that isn’t including inmates who died because of violence outside of massacres (like the two prisoners found dead by strangulation in the prison of Esmeraldas yesterday).

The massacre in Latacunga prison has very certainly been organized in order to eliminate Leandro Norero, alias ‘El Patrón’, who was shot dead by other inmates during the riot. Considered as the main financier of the Los Lobos, Los Tiguerones and Los Chone Killers gangs, Norero has been arrested on last 26 May and was widely suspected of being the owner of various companies used to launder money from the drug trade. He was an associate of Xavier Jordán, the shady businessman and fugitive from Ecuadorian justice photographed next to UNES legislator Ronny Aleaga in the pool of his Miami villa. According to Primicias, the murder of Norero was organized by the Los Lobos gang over Norero's plans and talks with the Los Choneros for unifying the various Ecuadorian drug gangs he neglected to inform the Los Lobos leadership about. The subsequent massacre in Guayaquil prison is likely a reprisal against the Los Lobos for the murder of Norero.

In the immediate aftermath of the massacre in the Littoral Penitentiary, the police has apparently nothing more urgent to do than attacking, firing tear gas and insulting relatives of inmates, human rights activists and journalists awaiting for information on the names of the killed and injured prisoners.

This will obviously not improve the already terrible reputation of the Ecuadorian police just when President Lasso has finally confirmed Gen. Fausto Salinas at the head of the police in spite of his complete inability to get the main suspect in the murder of María Belén Bernal arrested (it is now presumed the police instructor has fled to Colombia). Lasso has previously told on television Salinas would be fired if the assassin of Bernal hadn’t been arrested by the end of last month but he has since changed his mind (another broken promise of the president to add on a long list).

And just after it has been learned that one of the main suspects in the murder of ‘Don Naza’ and member of the Los Lobos has benefited from alternative measures to detention on 30 September and managed to get rid of his electric tag the day just after his conditional release. Before vanishing.

To this already very grim picture must be added the latest attack on the press: on 7 October, in Guayaquil, unknowns on a motorcycle fired on the headquarters of the RTS television channel and dropped leaflets threatening to kill distributors and sellers of the Diario Extra newspaper. The leaflets, that also threaten the life of the director of Diario Extra, are signed ‘Nueva Generación’, a transparent allusion to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

[Sir John Johns]

According to the latest report of the Food and Agriculture Organization on hunger in Latin America 2.7 millions people are suffering from hunger in Ecuador. This is accounting for 15.4% of the country’s total population, making Ecuador the second South American country most affected by hunger behind Venezuela (22.9%) and the fifth most affected in Americas behind Haiti (47.3%), Venezuela, Nicaragua (18.6%) and Guatemala (16%). It should be noted that Bolivia is slightly less affected by hunger (13.9%) while neighboring Peru and Colombia are faring better with respectively ‘only’ 8.3% and 8.2% of the population suffering from hunger.

This 2018 article is indicating, but this isn’t a surprise, that the areas most affected by child malnutrition are the indigenous and rural communities in the central highlands, notably Chimborazo and Bolívar provinces. Also affected is Santa Elena, a coastal province suffering from aridity, and indigenous communities in the Amazon.

[Sir John Johns]

Constitutional Court is rejecting two referendum questions

In a major political setback for the government, the Constitutional Court has rejected the two most relevant referendum questions proposed by the government (Question 1 on the army assisting the police in internal security area; Question 6 on stripping the CPCCS of most of its duties). For the court justices, both proposals of constitutional changes would alter the fundamental structure of the Constitution and the constitutive elements of the state. As such, they can’t be considered as simple constitutional amendments directly put to referendum by the president.

The correct way to get them passed is the so-called ‘partial reform of the constitution’, a process which requires before a referendum two debates in a plenary session of the National Assembly and the approval of the drafted constitutional change by the same National Assembly. This is over for these two proposals, which are constituting the core of the referendum, even if the government could still try to get the proposal on military assisting the police being sent to the National Assembly, get it rejected, then blaming insecurity problems on the legislature for not having approve the constitutional change.

The other questions, of secondary importance, have been green-lighted by the Constitutional Court that has ruled they can appears on the ballot paper, but the highest court has now to review the constitutionality of the appendices to the questions and can still reject them, further reducing the scope of the planned referendum.


Various ministerial changes have happened these last days:

- Guillermo Rodríguez, a police officer who has previously served as an undersecretary for control and public order in the government ministry under both Moreno and Lasso, is becoming the new director of the SNAI prison administration, the fifth person to hold the job since Lasso’s inauguration.

- the secretariat for Human Rights has been upgraded to a full ministry as the ministry for Woman and Human Rights, supposedly to increase government’s efforts in the fight against gender-based violence.

- the secretariat for Management and Development of Peoples and Nationalities, which had no titular office holder since July 2022, is hold by Gretty Vargas since last month. Vargas is a Kichwa woman from the Amazonian province of Pastaza who previously served as a CREO alternate assemblywoman from Pastaza in 2017-2021.

- Andrés Seminario, a publicist and until recently a columnist for El Universo has been appointed as the new secretary for communication, in charge of the president’s public relations in replacement of Leonardo Laso, who has hold the post for only four months. A former vice president and director of the Chamber of Commerce of Guayaquil, Seminario has already held the job of secretary for Communications and spokesman in the administration of President Alfredo Palacio (2005-07). He is also the son of the late Sergio Seminario, a banana producer who founded and presided the Association of Banana Exporters of Ecuador and served as a minister for agriculture in the Gutiérrez administration (2003-04).

The appointment of Seminario happens in the wake of a succession of PR mistakes, the latest on record being the mention of the murder of a young policewoman shot and injured during the attack of a police station of Guayaquil the last week when the policewoman was then actually still on life support (she has died since).


Lasso is unable to communicate (episode 25,916)

However, there are some limits to communication and the problem lies also in the personality of the president himself as exemplified by this episode, which took place on 29 September during the delivery of 50 housings in the rural province of Cañar as part of a publicity stunt for a government-sponsored housing program:

https://twitter.com/ecuainm_oficial/status/1575601505184337920

Controversy on social networks because of this video in which President Guillermo Lasso plays a joke on a female citizen, while accomplishing the “symbolic delivery” of the key of her new house. Internet users have described the action of the president as humiliating.

The gesture of the president was even criticized in an editorial of Primicias that describes the ‘image of the President of the Republic, joking in the face of the hope of a woman, with the tricolor in the midst of all this’ [an Ecuadorian flag was attached to the key] as ‘an indignity in many ways’.

The day after the appointment of Seminario to reshuffle the presidential communication, Lasso had an interview in the presidential palace with Carlos Vera (remember, not the journalist the most hostile to the current administration) which apparently turned into a PR disaster with the most remembered parts being:

- Lasso asking Vera whether he knows where is located the Upano River bridge (currently hit by floods), to which Vera wrongly answered Napo province and had to be corrected by Lasso who, also wrongly, indicated it is in Zamora Chinchipe (it is actually in Morona Santiago, a perfect demonstration of the disconnection and ignorance of the political and medias elites)

- Lasso asking Vera to apologize for having , just few days before, loudly insulted his own sound technician during the broadcast of one of his online program

- Lasso making a series of attacks against the press, talking about two Ecuadors (‘the Ecuador that the press is looking at and the Ecuador that the Ecuadorians are looking at’), panning  El Universo twice, notably for its coverage of paracetamol shortage in a Guayaquil hospital dubbed by Lasso as ‘the typical news of the communication medias, scandalize, aim at cornering the government and the president’ and ‘not inform about the new medication delivery system’ set up by his administration.

https://twitter.com/vilmavargasva/status/1580738045007237121?cxt=HHwWgsDQ-Y649O8...

Lasso: Where is the Upano River?
Ana Belén Cordero: In Buenos Aires province!
Lasso: No, it is in Zamora Chinchipe.

A CREO assemblywoman, Cordero indeed once publicly mentioned the non-existing Ecuadorian province of Buenos Aires (she also made incredibly moronic comments about how, as the indigenous 'have money to protest', they don’t need medicines in the hospitals). The computation on the chalkboard is another mistake made by Lasso during the interview as, according to the presidential mathematics, a $20 daily wage is now making a $200 monthly wage.

[Sir John Johns]

The dialogue round tables involving the government and the indigenous organizations have concluded on 14 October with mixed results. If the government prides itself of having reached 218 agreements, 79 disagreements have emerged during the discussions.

Disagreements appeared notably in the round tables dedicated to:

- energy and renewable resources with the indigenous movement considering that the right for a free and informed prior consultation before starting of extractive activities not being guaranteeing (it wants a prior consultation for the delivery of an environmental permit) and not having obtained a complete prohibition of the expansion of oil activities.
- productive development where the government rejected the indigenous demand for the exclusion of agriculture sector from free-trade agreements
- labors rights where the indigenous didn’t obtained the end of layoffs in public sector and the reintegration of 1,500 public health employees dismissed by the Moreno administration as part of its austerity program
- price control where the government only agreed on the establishment of minimum and maximum prices for thirteen basic products when the indigenous were asking for forty-four
- targeting of fuel subsidies, the most important one, where no agreement could be reached on the definition of a comprehensive policy to focus the subsidies on the most-needing sectors. A major point of disagreement was also the insistence of the government to keep the fuel subsidies to shrimp and tuna fishing sectors

Still, the indigenous movement has notably obtained a one-year moratorium on the exploitation of fifteen oil blocks  and the suspension of the delivery of new mining rights until the promulgation of a new legal framework guaranteeing the right for prior consultation, better social electricity and mobile phone/Internet tariffs for underprivileged households, an increase of the budget for the Intercultural Education System, the reaffirmation that the Ecuadorian Institute of Security Social couldn’t be managed by private companies and an increase of the quotas of ethnocultural minority students in the higher education system.

As noticed by Primicias, the demands of the indigenous organizations went beyond the sole concerns of the indigenous communities and were also concerning women (with the request for a plan to fight gender-based violence), prisoners (with the creation of a biometric registration system to ensure the enforcement of the sentence and a program to improve the situation of prisoners suffering from mental health issues) as well as diplomatic relations (with the publication over agreements concluded by the government with the United States).

A monitoring table is to be set up to ensure the implementation of the proposals signed by both parties while the CONAIE has to review the results of the round tables before deciding of potential new mobilizations.


The ID has (again) changed its parliamentary coordinator: after the resignation on 15 October of Marlon Cadena, who has held the job of coordinator of the ID caucus since last January, the party has announced that his successor, the third coordinator since the beginning of the legislature, will be Ramiro Narváez, a provincial assemblyman from Carchi province.

https://twitter.com/ID12Ecuador/status/1581679213056126978

Except that, wait a minute, the election of Narváez is disputed and dubbed as illegal by… the ID parliamentary bench, which is arguing it is the assemblymen who should elected the parliamentary coordinator, not the party. The ID bench has renewed its support to Cadena and the outgoing sub-coordinator against Narváez and the new sub-coordinator.

https://twitter.com/BancadaID/status/1582073235575013376

[Sir John Johns]

More post-modern absurdities, this time in relation with the upcoming local elections:

https://twitter.com/rc5oficial/status/1578439407664648202

#communiqué The ‘correísmo’ has an exclusive and unique relationship with the Citizen Revolution, the organization owner of the brand, hence we demand movements and persons who are using the expression in an unfair and opportunist way to refrain from doing so.

This is beyond parody, but the RC has to issue such statement to address the multiplication of candidates not endorsed by the RC and supported by other parties who nevertheless are campaigning as if they were the legit Correísta candidates and had the support of the former president.

The RC has tried to remedy the problem by sending its candidates to Venezuela where Correa is to be found at the moment to take pictures with the former president. The photography of the candidate and Correa will then appeared on electoral leaflet, a strategy already used at the time Correa was president.

https://twitter.com/MashiRafael/status/1556654049038049281

Prominent cases of candidates trying to pass as Correístas or trying to seduce Correísta voters with deceitful practices are including:

- Jonathan Parra, the MOVER (ex-Alianza PAIS) candidate for mayor of Guayaquil, who has featured in his meetings people proclaiming to be ‘Correístas of Heart’. Parra was himself elected a Correísta substitute assemblyman in 2017 before rallying Moreno, in a way his Correísta credentials are stronger than the ones of the official RC candidate who is a political newcomer

- Agustín Casanova, the most important right-wing candidate in the race for prefect of Manabí, a stronghold of the RC, who let published a video in which a man told him that, while a supporter of Correa, he would voted for Casanova

- Oswaldo Carrillo Montero, who after failing to get the RC nomination for candidate for mayor of Montecristi (Manabí), is now as the AMIGO candidate, supposedly with the support of a ‘Front of Correístas of Montecristi’. He even produced his own photography of himself next to Correa thanks to Photoshop, but the result isn’t totally convincing.

https://twitter.com/AP_Kost/status/1581670784333774850

Such fake Correísta candidacies appear to fall into two categories: the true opportunists (like Parra and Casanova) and the RC loyal members who have been sidelined by the party leadership in favor of candidates previously active in other parties and may been supported by the bases of the RC (in Montecristi, Carrillo was the FCS candidate in 2019 and was endorsed by Correa himself in a video message while the current RC candidate campaigned for Yaku Pérez in 2021 and welcomed the election of Guadalupe Llori as the president of the National Assembly). In a reply to the statement issued by the RC, a local member of Yaguachi (Guayas) is also expressing his disappointment with the nomination of a PSC turncoat married to a wealthy businessman over a longtime activist he said is supported by the party’s local bases.


Additionally, the RC has registered as its candidate for mayor of Simón Bolívar (Guayas) a former OnlyFans model, Mafer Vargas, a selection that rose some critics outside the RC. For its part, SUMA has nominated as a candidate for Guayaquil municipal councilor the rapper-turned-evangelical pastor Gerardo Mejía who, as Gerardo, achieved fame in 1991 when his Rico Suave single peaked at number 7 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Gerardo previously ran for assemblyman for Ecuadorian expats in 2017 as a PSC candidate but failed to get elected.

In Cuenca, the alliance between Yaku Pérez and Jefferson Pérez apparently collapsed just before the registration and neither men are running (a nice way to waste your political capital for nothing).

In Quito, the candidacy of Jorge Yunda, at one point threatened by a lawsuit against the former mayor, was finally registered as, surprisingly, none of his rivals filed a legal challenge against it. While, the ID ‘star candidate’ Inty Grønneberg, saw his candidacy rejected by the CNE on the grounds he doesn’t fulfill the residence requirement; the ID has nominated the longtime municipal councilor Pablo Ponce as its replacement. The candidacy of Gustavo Baroja, a former prefect of Pichincha and former general secretary of Alianza PAIS who, after rumors he would run to regain his post of prefect, registered his name to run for mayor of Rumiñahui canton (a suburb of Quito) with the support of an alliance between MOVER, PID, UP, Avanza and a local party, was rejected on similar grounds (his name not appearing on the electoral rolls of Rumiñahui).

However, the biggest surprise has been Héctor Vanegas who, after having been in less than two months successively announced as a candidate for prefect of Guayas for the CD, for a CD-PSE alliance and for the sole PSE, is ultimately running as the candidate of MOVER forming a tandem with Jonathan Parra, the aforementioned fake Correísta candidate for mayor of Guayaquil.

The RC candidate for mayor of Tosagua (Manabí), Romel Cedeño, has been publicly attacked by Fernando Villavicencio for his alleged ties with drug trafficking. Indeed, Cedeño has been briefly arrested in 2021 in connection with an investigation over the construction of a clandestine runway used for cocaine trafficking but released shortly thereafter without being charged.

Somehow, CREO managed to come up with an even far worse candidate: it nominated as a candidate for mayor of Muisne (Esmeraldas) (and as part of an alliance with Avanza and Construye) Paul Vélez, who has already served as mayor of the canton between 2013 and 2014. The problem is that Vélez has been sentenced in first instance to twenty-five years in prison for having ordered the murder of the Correísta mayor-elected who had defeated him in the 2014 elections. Vélez registered his candidacy just few days after having left the prison, while awaiting the appeal trial. However, the CNE ruled to disqualify his candidacy for… unpaid alimony.