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At thirty-five years old, Daniel Noboa has recently been elected as Ecuador’s president, the youngest in the country’s history. Elections were called by former President Guillermo Lasso, who invoked- for the first time in Ecuador’s history- the“muerte cruzada” (two-way death) constitutional mechanism. This was done so that Lasso’s successor could complete the rest of the ex-president’s term in office. However, this has left Noboa with just over eighteen months to carry out a variety of much-needed reforms and policy changes. Therefore, Ecuadorians will have to head to the polls once again in May 2025, putting pressure on the new President to act in a quick and effective manner.
Ecuador’s volatile security situation has reached its peak, with police documenting over 4,374 homicides in the first six months of 2023. This has stemmed from the ever-increasing presence of organised crime in the region and the strategic geographical location of the country. Sat between the two major cocaine-producing regions of Colombia and Peru, and with direct access to the Pacific Ocean, it has become a hub for drug trafficking in the region, primarily through its ports. The country’s biggest export- bananas- is being used as a cover for cocaine smuggling, with over 80% of it bound for Europe. The violence associated with these criminal gangs seems to have followed them to what was once considered one of the safest countries in South America. Homicide rates have risen fivefold since 2019, and this is due in a large part to violent feuds amongst local gangs which are allied to a variety of Mexican drug cartels, Colombian guerrilla groups and even Balkan traffickers.
As Ecuador battles an unprecedented crime wave on top of an ailing economy attempting to recover from the global pandemic, these elections were seen as a prime opportunity to show politicians what mattered most. Following the murder of anti-corruption campaigner and presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, opinion polls suggested that security was voters’ main concern going into the elections, As a twenty-three year-old student told Reuters news agency: “Our president should waste no time and work very hard to put the brakes on insecurity.”
Noboa faces the challenge of both the limited time he’s got to serve and the ever-growing list of issues he’s expected to solve. Additionally, he will have to acclimatise to governing with only 10% of the seats in Congress, within an extremely fragmented National Assembly. as following the new legislative elections in August, no single party or political group holds an overall majority. All these factors add to his lack of political experience, as he only recently joined the world of politics in 2021. Previously, he worked for his multimillionaire father’s sprawling banana empire, prompting him to embrace pragmatism as his “northern star”, as argued by Santiago Basabe. Basabe asserts that the new President should avoid engaging with the National Assembly, focusing instead on what he can do through executive action as “He must deal with the insecurity. To some extent, he should promote public health, support the most impoverished sectors, and grant opportunities for higher education.”
Noboa’s victory in the recent elections comes amidst suspicions of him being part of a political trend rightward, as already seen with the appointment of Guillermo Lasso, who was the country’s first elected conservative leader in nearly two decades. The latter embraced a military approach to combat organised crime (with the support of both the United States and Israel). There seems to be widespread concern amongst political scientists and analysts in the region as they fear Noboa will turn to the same strategy – following the example of Nayib Bukele, current president of El Salvador – thus embracing a militarised ‘war on drugs’ which they believe will only lead the already damaged country into more violence.
However, as analysts have argued, “Lowering the criminal violence, reducing corruption and achieving economic growth are all priorities for Latin America” right now. Unfortunately though, only one or two of these major problems can be tackled-even if for a short period of time – at once. We must therefore consider, will Noboa be able to accomplish everything the electorate has asked for?
Image: Session of the National Assembly by Christian Medina, 11.08.2022 // CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED
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