Ecuador on the eve of elections amidst violence

The violence that has kept the country in chaos for more than a year threatens the normality of the presidential and legislative elections to be held in Ecuador on the 20th. Thirteen million voters are called to the polls, many of them emigrants from abroad. These are early elections, called together with his resignation six months ago by President Guillermo Lasso, who ended up finding himself unable to control a situation that began in the prisons, where thousands of members of the street gangs that are destabilising several Latin American countries are being held. So far this year there have been 146 attacks.

The declaration of the state of emergency, which has been in force for months, far from helping to restore order, has aggravated the increasingly divided and angry situation, and the number of victims of urban clashes and repression has risen. In Guayaquil's El Litoral prison alone, the death toll in repeated uprisings reached 100 and a half. The most recent incident surrounding these killings was a popular protest because the government refused to pay for the burial expenses of the victims.

The attack that has received the most attention in recent days is that of the prestigious mayor of Manta, Agustín Intriago. He is the fourth mayor to be assassinated and, a few hours ago, a group of four individuals who approached the home of the mayor, Connie Jiménez, on a motorbike shot at her house. The number of victims recorded so far this year is not known precisely, because they are scattered all over the country and the local press estimates that there have been many tens of hundreds. In reality, the violence is led by the maras, whose members remain at large, but in some cases it is also attributed to drug traffickers and other criminals who respond to personal grudges and confrontations backed by the atmosphere of inability of law enforcement to control order.  

Ecuador is a sort of conservative island surrounded by neighbours with Sandinista regimes, from Venezuela, with all its economic and social disasters, to Gustavo Petro's Colombia (these days beset by scandals involving his son during the elections), to Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, and so on. The propaganda emanating from these regimes has led Ecuadorians to confront the Lasso administration, elected in 2021. Lasso is a banker whose financial activity has always aroused suspicion and criticism, although his management has not caused any scandal.

In Ecuador, meanwhile, politics has for years been stigmatised by the memory of former president Rafael Correa, who, from his exile in Belgium, continues to exert constant revolutionary activity and a great deal of influence in the popular sphere. In the elections on the 20th, his representative, the revolutionary activist Luisa González, who starts as favourite, will compete with seven other candidates, among them the businessman Jan Topic, who enjoys conservative sympathies, the well-known Yaku Pérez and the former vice-president Otto Sonnoholzner, who has a good memory and an effective propaganda team that is giving him a certain popularity.