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Ecuadorian voters headed to the polls on Sunday amid a wave of political violence unprecedented in the South American nation’s modern history.
The country will select and elect a new legislature from among eight presidential candidates. If no presidential candidate wins with more than 40 percent of the vote and a margin of 10 percent, a runoff will be held in October. Given the large number of candidates, pollsters expect a second round of voting.
The early election was thrown into chaos last week when center-right anti-corruption candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated as he was leaving a rally in the capital Quito.
Police are detaining six Colombian nationals in connection with the murder, while the government has pledged to hunt down the “intellectuals” of the plot. Authorities have yet to determine a motive for the assassination.
Before the media blackout earlier this month, leftist Luisa González was the frontrunner in the polls. Her mentor, former President Rafael Correa, has been campaigning for her since he went into exile in Belgium, where he is currently living to avoid corruption convictions in Ecuador.
The security crisis in the once peaceful country of 18 million has dominated much of the campaign. Some 3,500 people were killed in the first six months of this year, up from 4,800 last year and four times as many as in 2018, according to the interior ministry.
Drug cartels have expanded their operations in Ecuador in recent years, taking advantage of relatively lax port security along the Pacific coast.
“The first thing Ecuador needs to do is end the violence,” said José Castillo, a 30-year-old music producer in Quito, who plans to vote for Gonzalez. “But the right cannot stop it.”
Doménica Ochoa, an architect who backs investor-friendly centre-right candidate Otto Sonnenholzner, said: “Safety is my biggest concern. Because there are no Safe, there will be no foreign investment in Ecuador.”
Political violence is sweeping the country, with three politicians, including Villavicencio, murdered in the past month. Agustin Intriago, the mayor of the port city of Manta, was assassinated at a public event in late July, as was Pedro Briones, an organizer of the Pledge to Correa organizer was shot on Monday in the violent coastal province of Esmeraldas on the Colombian border.
The shootout erupted near former Vice President Sonnen Holzner as he was dining at a restaurant in Guayaquil on Saturday. Police said the shooting was not aimed at the candidate, but occurred because of a robbery nearby.
Another candidate, Daniel Noboia, the son of banana tycoon Alvaro Noboia, said Thursday his convoy had been attacked. Interior Minister Juan Zapata later said Noboia was not a target.
Zapata said 100,000 police and soldiers would be deployed across the country on Sunday and voting would be mandatory. Preliminary results are expected to be released Sunday evening.
In May, President Guillermo Lasso used a constitutional clause known as “mutual death” to dissolve Congress, triggering hastily scheduled elections.
The former banker, who is not seeking re-election, faces impeachment charges in the opposition-controlled National Assembly on corruption charges related to the misappropriation of contracts he signed before taking office.
Also on the ballot are two referendum questions on whether to halt oil drilling in the Amazon region and mining of the vast swath of land near Quito known as the Choco Andino. Voters are expected to approve both measures.
Whoever wins the presidency will have to contend with a widening fiscal deficit and rising debt-servicing costs in the oil and shrimp exporter.
Domenica Avila, an Ecuadorian political analyst and researcher at King’s College London, said the violence surrounding the election could favor law and order candidate Jan Topic and Cristian Sue, who replaced Villavicencio. Rita, but added that it had a bad effect on Ecuadorian institutions. .
“How can we talk about democracy when state institutions cannot guarantee that Ecuadorians can safely exercise their right to vote?”
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