QUITO, Ecuador—Latin America’s first presidential election of 2025 is within the books. Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, comfortably gained reelection over his rival, Luisa González, after a marketing campaign dominated by a safety disaster because the nation’s violent crime fee has skyrocketed resulting from drug-related violence.
The appropriate-wing Noboa has crafted a tough-on-crime picture, promising to crack down on the transnational drug cartels which have triggered crime spikes in Ecuador in recent times. He gained regardless of briefly dropping recognition in late 2024 when a severe drought led to vitality rationing and rolling blackouts throughout the nation.
QUITO, Ecuador—Latin America’s first presidential election of 2025 is within the books. Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, comfortably gained reelection over his rival, Luisa González, after a marketing campaign dominated by a safety disaster because the nation’s violent crime fee has skyrocketed resulting from drug-related violence.
The appropriate-wing Noboa has crafted a tough-on-crime picture, promising to crack down on the transnational drug cartels which have triggered crime spikes in Ecuador in recent times. He gained regardless of briefly dropping recognition in late 2024 when a severe drought led to vitality rationing and rolling blackouts throughout the nation.
González, a leftist protege of former President Rafael Correa, rejected the preliminary outcomes and demanded a recount after the Nationwide Electoral Council declared Noboa the winner.
Noboa and González had faced off in a closer-than-expected first-round election in February, wherein each candidates secured round 44 % of the vote however fell wanting the 50 % wanted to keep away from an April runoff. However Noboa seems to have made up floor within the interim, successful Sunday’s vote by a large margin.
“Today has been historic, this victory has additionally been historic, a victory by greater than 10 factors,” Noboa informed supporters after the outcomes had been introduced. “There isn’t a doubt who the winner is.”
Within the capital of Quito, supporters held up life-sized cardboard cutouts of a sunglasses-clad Noboa, one wearing a Spider-Man costume. Noboa first gained snap elections in 2023 by vowing to stiffen drug penalties and improve surveillance of alleged drug sellers. Ecuador had seen an unprecedented rise in homicides as Colombian and Mexican drug cartels infiltrated local gangs and used the nation for the transshipment of cocaine, turning the once-peaceful nation into the most dangerous in South America.
However Noboa’s first 16 months in workplace introduced little enchancment. Whereas the murder fee dropped between 2023 and 2024, it has spiked once more in 2025, with a report 781 killings in January alone in a rustic of simply 18 million folks. He confronted heavy criticism final 12 months when 4 kids, aged 11 to fifteen, had been captured by an air drive patrol after taking part in a soccer recreation, then found dead weeks later. Neither Noboa nor his opponents brazenly pointed fingers on the navy, which has been accused of widespread rights abuses throughout anti-crime campaigns.
His response has been to draw closer to the US and President Donald Trump, who congratulated Noboa on his Fact Social community on Monday morning.
“His whole discourse focuses on worldwide collaboration, primarily from the US,” stated Esteban Ron, dean of the College of Social and Authorized Sciences at Quito’s SEK Worldwide College.
Noboa attended Trump’s January inauguration and final month visited Mar-a-Lago after reportedly paying a consulting firm to safe him an invite.
Ecuador is planning for the development of a naval facility within the coastal metropolis of Manta that will host U.S. forces, whom Noboa hopes will help in battling gangs. The U.S. navy manned a base in Manta till 2009, when then-President Correa declined to renew its lease. González opposed the institution of overseas navy bases in Ecuador, that are at present prohibited below its structure.
Noboa in March announced a “strategic alliance” with Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who has lobbied in latest months to contain himself with anti-drug operations in Latin America and deportations from the U.S. to El Salvador. Days earlier than the election, Prince joined legislation enforcement operations in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest metropolis and certainly one of its most harmful. The group detained 40 folks, lots of whom have since been launched.
“[They were] seemingly used to advertise a publicity marketing campaign” for Prince, stated Carla Morena Álvarez Velasco, a professor and researcher on the Ecuadorian Institute of Excessive Nationwide Research. “His participation seems uncoordinated with any recognized native technique or goal, and coincides with a political timing that’s tough to miss.”
Ecuador’s surge of violence spilled into politics in 2023 when presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, a critic of corruption and legal gangs, was assassinated at a rally within the north of Quito, allegedly at the order of the Los Lobos organized crime group. Simply earlier than the election, Villavicencio’s widow accused the Noboa administration of pressuring her accountable Correa’s political social gathering for the homicide regardless of already understanding who was accountable.
However Noboa was capable of soundly defeat an opposition marketing campaign that typically appeared disorganized and lacked substantive alternate options to Ecuador’s safety, financial, and vitality points.
González pledged to observe her mentor, Correa, by growing social spending to assist these residing in poverty. However her social gathering’s previous financial mishaps “undermined her discourse” among the many public, Ron stated.
Noboa touted his relationship with Trump in angling to keep away from tariffs, claiming that its 10 % fee would rise ought to González win. He has not commented on Trump’s cuts to the U.S. Company for Worldwide Improvement, which delivered $117.3 million between 2020 and 2024 to Ecuador.
Ecuadorians have left the nation in droves; greater than 90,000 folks left in 2024, and Ecuadorians had been the second-largest group crossing the Darién Gap in 2023, after Venezuelans.
Within the ultimate months of 2024, the disaster worsened when Ecuador, which depends on hydropower for about three-quarters of its vitality, skilled a extreme drought that led to an influence scarcity and scheduled blackouts of as much as 14 hours per day. Noboa’s administration was criticized for ignoring warning indicators earlier within the 12 months, when water ranges had been low within the Amazon.
“It ended up affecting the picture of Noboa within the first spherical,” stated Homero Paltán, a researcher on local weather and water dangers at Oxford College. “[He] received fortunate, in a method, that it began raining.”
With the blackouts within the rearview mirror, Noboa and González principally performed a blame recreation throughout the marketing campaign. Noboa accused Correa of inflicting it by relying too closely on hydropower, whereas González stated there have been no blackouts below Correa, though his presidency occurred throughout a collection of unusually moist years.
“The dialogue has been extremely political from either side with out actually addressing the technical and structural points,” Paltán stated.
Each candidates expressed openness to growing Ecuador’s capability of wind, photo voltaic, and different renewable vitality, and promised to restore thermal energy vegetation that malfunctioned throughout the disaster. Noboa has pledged to hunt personal funding within the vitality sector. González favors extra state management and has stated she would search public-private partnerships, however gave few particular particulars.
Ecuador has seen intensifying fluctuations between moist and dry spells that mission to worsen within the years to come back. It already has frequent environmental disasters in its oil-producing areas, most recently an oil spill in March, and the nation’s vitality demand is predicted to double by 2050 as its inhabitants grows. Ecuador’s safety and financial points are thus deeply wedded to its capacity to supply energy—and at current, that continues to be depending on the rain.
“It will simply occur once more,” Paltán stated. “That’s the issue with local weather change.”
