By Michael Otto, Ibarra, Ecuador, May 2025

Long-time US resident of Ecuador analyses results of Ecuador’s recent elections

The people of Ecuador were the big losers in the second round of the April 13 elections. Left forces were gravely wounded. Luisa González, the progressive candidate for the party called Revolución Ciudadana (RC) was crushed in a virtual landslide of 11%. Analysis of various polls suggests the real outcome would have been a “technical tie”. The actual results will not see the light of day. The corrupt CNE (National Electoral Council) refuses to open the “actas” to recount the votes.

The CNE either turned a blind eye to massive fraud or promoted it. Independent observers condemned the 60-day state of emergency which was imposed on 12 April in Quito, the capital city, one day before the elections. Martial law was declared in the
coastal provinces which supported RC candidate González in the first round.

The ballot numbers just don’t add up. Neither the exit polls nor the differences between the first and second rounds make sense. But it doesn’t appear the people will demand a recount.

Daniel Noboa won only 38.44% of the votes in the first round in our highland province of Imbabura. Luisa González (41.68%) and leftist Indigenous candidate Leonidas Iza (13.83%) totaled 55.51% between the two of them. But in the second round Noboa garnered 52.81% of the votes. Where did Noboa’s 14% increase come from?

Leonidas Iza urged his Indigenous movement over and over again after he lost in the first round to reject the right. “¡Ni un solo voto a la derecha!” (Not one vote for the right!) So what happened to Iza’s 13.83%? It’s hard to believe that 60% of Indigenous voters in the province ignored the respected president of the CONAIE Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador. Luisa González gained only 5.51% more than she won in the first round.

An obscene military presence

Thousands of domestic poll watchers and scores of foreign observers witnessed an obscene military presence during the election process. The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) sent a delegation from the U.S. to observe the elections with the Movimiento Afrodescendiente Nacional Ecuatoriano (MANE) in Guayaquil. BAP wrote, “We observed several troubling elements, including an excessive military presence, particularly at polling stations located in predominantly AfroEcuadorian precincts.”

BAP also reported about the devastation that austerity produces. Seven years of neoliberal government mismanagement of the oil pipelines on the coast have ruined a river ecosystem and the lives of countless people in the northwestern coastal city of Esmeraldas. Racist state repression was behind the military kidnapping, torture and murder of four teenage Afro-descendent soccer players in Guayaquil. The lives of the people of Ecuador mean nothing to the oligarch class represented by Daniel Noboa.   

A furious Luisa González said “This is a dictatorship, and this is the most massive electoral fraud we Ecuadorians are witnessing!”

The Ecuadorian left is divided and bitter. Former mayor of Quito Augusto Barrera said “from a virtual tie at 44% in the first round, Noboa increased his vote count by 1,283,433, almost all of the votes that were in dispute, while González added only about 158,000, almost ten times less. This difference of almost one million votes comes from an increase in Quito and Guayaquil (half a million votes), followed by an increase in the central-southern highlands.”

Barrera concluded, “Noboa’s political, media, and institutional operation was more efficient in winning almost all of the votes that were still in dispute.”

It was a “technical tie”

Lizardo Herrera, writing in the online publication Rebelión, demolishes Barrera’s theory. “A more plausible explanation would be the colossal spending on government bonds—a serious violation that the CNE allowed to pass and that completely tainted the electoral process.”

The CNE permitted Noboa to bribe thousands of people with $560 million of government funds. The bribes were called “bonos,” payments of one kind or another. Hundreds of citizens in Esmeraldas who were devastated by a break in an oil pipeline got bonos prior to the election.

Herrera’s book, Under the Empire of Terror: Militarization, Drugs, and Death in Ecuador, is free online.

Independent Ecuadorian analyst/researcher, Omar Maluk Salem conducted his own online post- election poll from April 16-19 and tweeted: “Election survey with 13,500 respondents. The probability that the [official CNE] results are authentic is now almost impossible and infinitesimal.”

Maluk’s poll recorded a “technical tie” with Noboa in the lead. Results of the numerous polls cancel each other out and also indicate a technical tie.

Polarization in the northern Andes

In the northern Andes of Ecuador where we live, the population is polarized and anti-correaismo is rampant, as it is throughout the high sierra. Quito is the most extreme. The region that soundly rejected Daniel Noboa was the coast, where the expansion of narco-state terrorism is rampant.

The correaista (RC) mayor of Quito, Pabel Muñoz, and the RC prefect of Pichincha, Paola Pabón, have accepted the election results. The mayor of Guayaquil, Aquiles Alvarez, acknowledged the defeat of the RC and said, “If the people have chosen, we must respect their decision.” He added, “The worst thing is to be a bad loser.” 

Pachakutik and the left parties which signed an historic pact of solidarity with RC on March 30, have also accepted the results.

Luisa González is fired up. She said “I refuse to believe that there are people who prefer lies to the truth.”

Unfortunately, when a lie is repeated over the air waves 24/7, day in and day out, year after year, it comes to be accepted as the truth. The big lie is that Rafael Correa is the cause of everything that’s wrong with Ecuador. The second big lie is that Luisa González would turn Ecuador into another Venezuela (which many Ecuadorians feel would be worse than going to hell).

Six million people live on $3 per day. Two million people exist on $1 per day in a country of 18 million. 10,553,878 votes were cast, 83% of the electorate. Four or five out of every ten Ecuadorians voted for the oligarchy, the elite enemy of their class. That is the significance of a technical tie.

Historian Juan Paz y Miño wrote, “in an atmosphere of total polarization and hatred cultivated on a daily basis, ‘Correaismo’ is historically ruined.”

The consequences of the April 13 electoral coup will be grim, especially for the two thirds of the working class who sustain the informal economy with honest sweat. But it will be even worse for Afro-Ecuadorians and people of mixed backgrounds who live in impoverished city neighborhoods on the coast.

The reality is that the system is rigged so well it could elect a cardboard puppet. Oscar Leon writes a hard hitting piece for the Grayzone: “President Daniel Noboa appears to have stolen Ecuador’s election. He’s now poised to consolidate control of a system that has benefitted cartels and multinational corporations – including his family business – at the expense of average Ecuadorians. And Washington likes what it sees.”

Reports from Pablo Meriguet of Peoples Dispatch and numerous other sites have also exposed irregularities, especially the militarization of the process. Daniel Noboa’s repression of 100 opposition leaders and his hostile relations with nations of the region will have unpredictable consequences. It seems Noboa wants to emulate the brutality of Netanyahu and the bluster of Donald Trump.

Sheinbaum withholds recognition

President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has vowed to withhold recognition of Noboa’s reelection indefinitely. Mexicans will not forget that on 5 April 2024, Ecuador’s National Police stormed the Mexican embassy in Quito – an act of war. Mexico had granted asylum to former vice president Jorge Glas, now a political prisoner, who was sequestered in the operation.

The corrupt Grupo Noboa conglomeration will continue its narco-trafficking with impunity. The National Assembly will be a circus. The narco-state will be consolidated under the Pentagon, which already has total impunity to ignore the laws of Ecuador.

The U.S. has a base in the Galapagos and another base under construction in Manta, a small coastal province north of Guayaquil. Ecuador will be turned into a neocolonial outpost of the empire.

The Monroe Doctrine puts Noboa in the center of an axis of useful idiots from Milei in Argentina to Bukele in El Salvador, strategically aligned to kiss Trump’s @## in Washington. Ajamu Baraka of Black Alliance for Peace tweeted “I just returned from leading an election observer delegation to Ecuador. The right is on the move from the U.S. and Israel to the Americas and Africa.”

A hub for world cocaine trafficking

Grayzone journalist Oscar Leon wrote, “Ecuador’s ports are a hub for world cocaine trafficking, while its dollarized, deregulated system is a laundering paradise, feeding a global need for narco cash.”

In the greatest fraud of the whole election, the CNE ignored the case of Maria Moreno Herredia, president of Daniel Noboa’s political party, ADN. She was arrested in connection with the seizure of 1.3 tons of cocaine. She managed Noboa companies.

Luisa González’s words in the March 23 presidential debate fell on deaf ears. She said: “Noboa Trading—an Ecuadorian company owned by Mr. Noboa—was caught exporting drugs in banana boxes in 2020, 2022, and 2024. Five prosecutors have been replaced. To this day, the case remains unresolved. The real pact with mafias is yours. And you still haven’t answered: why is the president of your political party [María Moreno] involved in a drug trafficking case?

“The Prosecutor’s Office removed her name from the system, and only after public outcry did they restore the data. So again, who’s funding political campaigns with drug money?”

A few days after the debate María Moreno was acquitted.

Andrés Duran is an Ecuadorian investigator and colleague of Grayzone reporter Oscar Leon. He said “While Luisa González mentioned only three cases [in her TV debate with Noboa], out of the 17 documented cases, at least five are directly linked to the Noboa Group—through Noboa Trading S.A. or affiliates like Bonita Banana.”

Duran, who is known in Ecuador as Chochologo, has investigated the Noboa family’s connections with narco-trafficking. Chochologo told Oscar Leon, “Ecuador is now ruled by a narco-political order where cash trumps justice and austerity insures that the state will not fight back… Noboa Trading, linked to President Noboa through Inmobiliaria Zeus S.A. (Ecuador) and Lanfranco Holding S.A. (Panamá), was caught red-handed trafficking cocaine… Noboa himself admitted [to Luisa González] on live TV that the company belongs to his family—a confession with explosive political, legal, and reputational consequences.”

Duran appears on the alternative media site Ecuador en Directo. He had to flee the country when his life was threatened after exposing María Moreno. The Youtube video is very powerful.

The elites of Ecuador derive super-profits from money laundering. Corporations pay taxes of 2%, if they pay taxes at all, and dictate austerity for the majority, whom they oppress with all the power of the state, while two thirds of the country labors in the informal economy. What must the silent majority of workers and the oppressed masses do to overcome this injustice?

Correa’s vision

Rafael Correa had a developmental vision for Ecuador’s economy, to liberate the country from its neocolonial dependency in the global capitalist rules-based order. The gemstone of his vision was Yachay Universidad Tech which opened in 2014. Yachay is in a rural district northwest of Ibarra. It was intended to educate future generations in science and technology. The traitor Lenin Moreno raised doubts continually about corruption, waste and mismanagement of the institution.

Construction of the “City of Knowledge” was halted. Internationally renowned professors of science were fired. In February 2023 Guillermo Lasso issued executive decree 639 to close it down. Yachay tentatively remains open with a future as uncertain as the future of today’s youth.

Neoliberal austerity cancels developmental plans for economic and food sovereignty. It fails to maintain public infrastructure which it aims to privatize.

Underdevelopment produces a brain drain of talented youth. Thousands are emigrating to the U.S. and Europe just to find work in hopes of a better life. Thousands more are trapped in impoverished barrios dominated by narco-terror.

Movimiento Afrodescendiente Nacional Ecuatoriano (MANE), in Guayaquil, is a beacon of hope in this bleak moment in the history of Ecuador. Arturo Ramírez of MANE wrote, “The National Afro-descendent Movement in Ecuador is a political organization whose main focus is to support all black/afro-descendent people and other disadvantaged communities within Ecuador in their fight for better social conditions. MANE seeks to strengthen and support the political representation of all black/Afro-descendent communities as well as other social groups so they can have a voice within society and its government. MANE pursues a socio-political agenda that promotes the demilitarization of the Pacific, the right to have a territory free of foreign military bases, and the right to pursue an economic agenda that promotes a system of solidarity, an alternative to the market-driven system, and the strengthening of socio-political support among peoples, communities, nations, and regions.”

Necropolitics

Juan Montaño Escobar in a reflection on Lizardo Herrera’s book asks, “How did Ecuador descend into an inferno of homicides?” For the past seven years the disastrous neoliberal trio of Lenin Moreno, Guillermo Lasso and Daniel Noboa cut budgets allowing infrastructure to rot along with horrendous health, education and social welfare cuts. Austerity demanded cuts in the budgets of the police and armed forces, creating weaknesses exploited by international mafias. Jobless youth are recruited into a “lumpenizing” socio-cultural narco-trap whose end is prison and death.

The narco-state closed prison-based rehabilitation programs which recognized the humanity of people deprived of their liberty. These horrific joints are ruled by heavily armed warring gangs. There is a continuity between the gang wars on the streets and the gruesome prison massacres of hundreds. Prisoners are no longer divided according to the danger they pose to society but according to their gang memberships.

One celebrated gangster boss maintained a tilapia pond in his “cell.” The result of the neoliberal prison transformation has been riots, massacres and chaos. Two new words entered the lexicon: necro-politics and necro-power. In other words narco-state terror dominated the streets of poor neighborhoods and the prisons which are filled with young men whose only future is violent death.

Juan Montaño Escobar writes that President Noboa’s declaration of internal war on Jan. 9, 2024 accelerated Ecuador’s  “transition from an independent republic to neocolonialism under the United States. This means that the crisis of violence opened a window of opportunity to align Ecuador with the geostrategic interests of the US power.”

According to the Ecuador Times, the former U.S. ambassador to Ecuador, Michael Fitzpatrick, criticized the justice system of Ecuador. In 2022 he accused the justice system of being “a camouflage to protect drug traffickers, thugs or their front men.”

In 2021, in an interview with Primicias, Fitzpatrick pointed to the law enforcement forces. He said it was an open secret, arguing that he only said out loud what people in the country were already saying quietly, when he declared that in Ecuador there are “narco generals.”

Iza: End the dispute between Correaismo and anti-Correaismo

Leonidas Iza is president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador) or, more commonly, CONAIE, Ecuador’s largest indigenous rights organization. Iza has long argued that Ecuador must put an end to the dispute between Correaismo and anti-Correaismo, which distracts people from talking about the real issues. Important issues for Iza are supports for small farm producers and controls on extractivism; prior consultation with the Indigenous CONAIE and respect for Indigenous communities; an end to criminalizing protest and “lawfare.”

Luisa González made history with a pact that should have won the elections. She united with the Indigenous movement and left parties. Rafael Correa and his party had provoked hostility by criminalizing Indigenous protest. Luisa González joined with the Indigenous Pachakutik party and several left organizations to sign an historic 25 point pact on March 30.

When the people of Ecuador finally decide they have had enough of the oligarchs and neoliberal government, this pact will gain in significance.

After signing the agreement with Luisa González, Guillermo Churuchumbi, National Coordinator of Pachakutik said “The Pachakutik movement has actively and participatively confronted a fascist right, a neoliberal right that only responds to the interests of certain families, not even of the business community. And we see that the majority of Ecuadorians are living in poverty. Six million Ecuadorians live on three dollars a day. Two million Ecuadorians live on one dollar a day. Sixty percent of young people are in search of employment and entrepreneurship.”

All transcriptions and translations are by Mike Otto.