2023-08-20 02:36:55
– Traumatized, Ecuador chooses a new president
Twelve days after the assassination of candidate Fernando Villavicencio, Ecuadorians are called to the polls this Sunday for an early presidential election.
Posted today at 04:36
While the country has been living under a state of emergency for more than a week, soldiers and police will be deployed throughout the territory for the vote this Sunday.
AFP
Ecuadorian voters go to the polls on Sunday for an early presidential election, upset by the assassination of one of the main candidates, against the backdrop of an unprecedented wave of violence linked to the growing drug trade.
The vote takes place twelve days after the execution in Quito, by a commando of Colombian hitmen, of the centrist Fernando Villavicencio, a 59-year-old ex-journalist, who came second in the polls. The assassination traumatized the country, but also reshuffled the cards of an election for which none of the eight candidates now seems able to win by an absolute majority and avoid a second round on October 15.
Institutional crisis
Long an oasis of peace in Latin America, renowned for its bananas, prawns and Galapagos Islands, Ecuador has been contaminated in recent years by drug trafficking from neighboring Colombia and Peru. To the point now of threatening the stability of institutions, and of resembling the bloody Colombia of the 1990s of the late drug baron Pablo Escobar.
While the Pacific coast – and its strategic port of Guayaquil – has long remained the epicenter of violence, Quito now lives in psychosis, with a nationwide homicide rate that doubled in 2022 and will break records this year. . Since 2021, more than 430 inmates have also killed each other in massacres between rival gangs in prisons across the country.
Added to this violence is an institutional crisis that has left the country without a Congress for the past three months, when the unpopular conservative incumbent President Guillermo Lasso decided to dissolve and call early elections to avoid impeachment. for corruption.
“Fear and pessimism”
Some 13.4 million voters (out of 18.3 million Ecuadorians) are called to vote between 07:00 and 17:00 local time (14:00 and 00:00 Swiss time) to elect the president and vice-president, as well as the 137 deputies of the unicameral Congress. The new president will be elected for a little over a year, until May 2025, a period corresponding to the theoretical end of Guillermo Lasso’s mandate.
A socialist lawyer fond of tattoos, a journalist appointed at the last moment to replace his friend who fell under the bullets and an ex-sniper of the French Foreign Legion will compete for the votes of the voters, among eight candidates living in the psychosis of an attack and leaving only dressed in bulletproof vests and under armed escort.
Ex-president in exile
The time having run out to print new ballots, the face of the deceased Villavicencio will always appear on the ballots of his replacement at short notice, the journalist Christian Zurita. Best friend and colleague of Villavicencio, Christian Zurita was of all the investigations having brought to light important scandals of corruption. The most resounding of these investigations resulted in the conviction of former socialist president Rafael Correa (2007-2017) to eight years in prison, forcing him into exile.
Her rival, and the only woman in the race for the presidency, Luisa Gonzalez, 45, is very close to Rafael Correa, whose adviser she was for a long time. She assured that she would make the ex-president in exile her adviser in the event of victory. Luisa Gonzalez was the favorite in the polls until Villavicencio’s assassination.
Behind Luisa Gonzalez and Zurita come former sniper and ex-paratrooper Jan Topic (right), indigenous leader Yaku Pérez (left) and former vice president Otto Sonnenholzner (right), according to polls from the start of the August. The first results must be published overnight by the electoral authority.
In Central America, Guatemalans are also electing their next president this Sunday after a campaign marked by attempts to disqualify the favorite in the polls, who has promised to tackle corruption in a country plagued by poverty and violence.
Whoever wins between Bernardo Arevalo and Sandra Torres, both social democrats, will put an end to twelve years of right-wing governments, including that of outgoing Alejandro Giammattei. According to the latest poll on Wednesday, Bernardo Arevalo, 64, was credited with 50% of the voting intentions, well ahead of Sandra Torres, 67, with 32%. The first official counts are expected overnight from Sunday to Monday.
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