With the support of Donald Trump, and a hard hand policy against crime that he wanted to repeat in Ecuador the success of the strong Salvadoran man Nayib Bikele, Daniel Noboa seemed to have the clear path for re -election. But two scandals have made a perhaps irreparable damage to their campaign, making the left -wing candidate, Luisa González, in favor of winning the elections of today Sunday. The most important exploded last week after the publication of an explosive video by the widow of Fernando Villavicencio, the candidate killed in the last elections two years ago. Verónica Sarauz, whose husband was shot dead after a rally of the electoral campaign in October 2023, accuses Noboa and the attorney general, Diana Salazar, of pressing her to publicly accuse the former president of the left, Rafael Correa, of being behind the murder. “They cheated me vilely (…) Fernando’s case has been used as a political weapon,” he says in the video. Now, Sarauz points directly against the president himself. Noboa and Salazar decided to “protect criminal structures within the State” and leave “in total impunity” the murder., Alleges. Denounces a “” network that involves the case “with collaboration” of drug trafficking, high controls of the National Police and financial powers that wash dirty money in Ecuador “” These statements can do a lot of damage to Noboa, according to sources consulted in Ecuador. Sarauz can hardly be accused of being politically motivated. She and her husband were “part of the most radical anti -correistic block,” Pablo Iturralde, an analyst at the Center for Economic and Social Rights in Quito in a telephone interview. “” Time has passed and has given them a lesson. “This” will positively affect the elections for Luisa, mainly among the vote of undecided. “In the 2023 elections, the politicized accusation against Correa, and by involvement, Luisa González, gave a turn to the electoral campaign. Before the murder of Villavicencio, González maintained the advantage in the surveys. Popularity, and the young candidate Noboa, son of a banana magnate and the richest man in Ecuador, ended up imposing himself on the October 2023. Noboa is “part of the sinister framework” in the murder of Villavicencio, according to the widows serious accusations against Correa – Ecuadorian president between 2007 and 2017 – they were based on his day in his day in the testimony By prosecution, José Patricio Am, who declared in the trial on the case that “the head (of Villavicencio) was worth 200,000 dollars and sent her to do the Correa government.” Now Sarauz has given the coup of the witness: “When I could have access to the complete testimony I was horrified; what I heard was a crude lie, a false positive built by the Prosecutor’s Office to make guilty and cover up the true responsible,” González has already been clearing other pitfalls that have frustrated the left in previous elections. He has managed to sign a pact with the largest indigenous confederation, CONAI, which had previously opposed the Correistic candidacies. González has also achieved significant support from the former right -wing, Jean Topic. The last turn of the Villavicencio case adds to a series of scandals surrounding the Noboa campaign. The most important concerns the relationship of companies of the Noboa family, registered in tax havens, with drug trafficking. In the previous elections, some democracy defense groups denounced Noboa for violating the electoral law that prohibits presidential candidates from keeping assets or capital in tax havens. The avant -garde could then verify when the archives access the International Consortium of Investigation Journalism (ICIJ) referring to the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers that Noboa appears in dozens of secret documents filtered from the law firm Mossack Fonseca that verifies the presence of offshore companies, registered in tax havens. Now the accusation against Noboa is more serious. According to the same Pandora papers, Noboa is one of the owners of Lanfranco Holdings SA, based in the offshore center in Panama and one of the largest entities of the Noboa family conglomerate. According to the journalist Claudia Jardim in Public Agency, Lanfranco is a majority partner of Noboa Trading, an offshore company based in Panama that has been a vehicle to export cocaine to Europe 700 kilograms of cocaine were confiscated by the Ecuadorian police between 2020 and 2022 after being hidden in banana containers of the same company, Noboa Trading. In a television debate during the campaign, Noboa denied being the owner of that company. However, Pandora’s papers, in the ICIJ database, indicate that Ecuadorian president effectively is one of the company’s owners. 700 kilos of cocaina is hidden in the baywoman containers Noboa Trading Noboa has responded to the scandals by flaunting their good relations with the Trump administration, even visiting Mar-A-Lago, in Florida, where he was photographed with the former president. At the same time, the president has defended the involvement of US military in the fight against endemic crime in Ecuador. He has proposed a constitutional amendment to allow the establishment of US military bases in Ecuador, something prohibited by the Constitution created during the first Government of Correa (2007-2012). He has also given green light to the presence of US troops in the Galapagos Islands. Even more controversial, Noboa has hired the American mercenary company Blackwater – notory for its participation in the war in Iraq – to support Ecuadorian security forces in the fight against crime. Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, intervened directly in the electoral campaign last week by publicly announcing that “Ecuadorians can choose between two paths: choose the law and order voting to Noboa, or choose what a narco state would be like Venezuela (…) with all the crime and socialism that comes with that.” All this raises the possibility that, in the case of a victory of González, Noboa question the result with the possible support of the Trump administration that did the same after his own defeat in the US presidential presidential ones of the 2020. Noboa already questioned the electoral legitimacy by denouncing signs of fraud in the first round that gave a technical tie result between Noboa and González both far away from the other fourteen candidates. “There will surely be fraud complaints, but I don’t think I have the strength to consolidate that thesis or a coup d’etat,” said Iturralde.
