Ecuador: next president will have to face security crisis

Until a few years ago Ecuador It was considered by its inhabitants a country of peace. Now Ecuadorians have a shared slogan for the president who wins the elections next sunday: security.

Delinquency and organized crime have turned the territory of the Andean country into a space without tranquility in the last three years, with murders, kidnappings, extortion and robberies on the agenda of citizens.

Regaining control of the country’s streets and prisons – where, according to the government, violence originates by order of criminal gangs – is the main challenge for the eight candidates who are running for president and who will only have 18 months in office.

The elections brought forward by a maneuver by President Guillermo Lasso by dissolving the Assembly and shortening his own term are held to elect a replacement until May 2025.

The call to the polls comes with an even more rarefied and frightening atmosphere for the 13.45 million voters after the recent assassinations of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio and Agustín Intriago, mayor of Manta, the third largest city in the country. The attacks shocked the population and further evidenced the vulnerability of society to organized crime.

Political analyst Grace Jaramillo, from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, noted that “These murders showed Ecuadorians how serious the situation was” when the country was still trying to assimilate an unusual environment marked by extortion, kidnapping and the action of hit men.

The consequence, added Jaramillo, is that “the economy, productivity, exports, everything is depressed; there are fewer and fewer jobs due to insecurity” and that the main concern of 80% of Ecuadorians is to find a solution to this complex problem with deep roots. “A quick solution, perhaps authoritarian, and that turns off the rest of the social concerns”, pondered.

The eight candidates, including the journalist Christian Zurita, whose nomination was accepted on Wednesday night one day after the end of the electoral campaign, carry the fight against crime and insecurity as their banner for the elections.

All of them also have coincident points in the formula that they will apply to deal with criminal action in the event of occupying the Carondelet Palace: reinforce the equipment and the number of members of the security forces, regain control of the prisons and be firm in the fight crime.

They also agree that they have not presented to the voters concrete details on how to achieve these results in a context of a weakened economy and bureaucratic difficulties in public contracting.

Above all, taking into account that the Ecuadorian authorities have pointed to the Mexican cartels of Jalisco Nueva Generación and Sinaloa, as well as the Colombian Cartel del Pacífico and the Albanian mafia, as the ultimate responsible for the violence and the dispute over territory that they maintain local bands in the country.

Huge amounts of drugs, especially cocaine, are exported from Ecuadorian ports and beaches to the United States, Europe and other destinations.

During the government of Guillermo Lasso, between May 2021 and August of this year, agents have seized 480 tons of drugs, 88% in the coastal region.

In parallel, the statistics of violent deaths have been doubling for two years and remain on an upward curve this 2023 with more than 3,500 registered murders.

Jaramillo said that the action of organized crime finds Ecuadorian society deeply divided and with no decision to unite efforts. “to deal with this and other problems that affect them.” The solutions, the analyst pointed out, will take decades.

In addition to dealing with a crisis of violence and the consequent discouragement of the population, the future president will receive an Ecuador that has not managed to recover from the contraction left by the pandemic.

The Central Bank reduced its growth expectation for 2023 from 3.1% to 2.6%, an annual economic performance that analysts forecast even lower.

The unemployment rate is a reflection of this panorama, standing at 3.8%, according to data from the Institute of Statistics and Censuses, and being accompanied by a job profile in which underemployment, informality and precariousness of jobs predominate. that do not reach a legal minimum wage.

Sandra Jarrín is 52 years old and four years ago she and about 20 people from the company where she worked as a receptionist lost their jobs due to a staff cut. She since then has not managed to find a new position.

“Since the pandemic, the country does not produce the same and now everything is virtual, that reduces work spaces,” commented. In addition to unemployment, she worries about insecurity. “We are not safe outside or in our homes,” she said disappointed and assured that the next government should address these two problems as a priority.

The winner of the presidential elections will inherit a State in which oil revenues have been reduced -being a nation that depends mainly on crude oil exports- and tax collection due to legal reforms and the loss of consumption capacity of the population.

According to data from the Ministry of Finance, public coffers received US$ 991 million from oil between January and July compared to 2,307 million in the same period in 2022, less than half. Meanwhile, tax revenues this year fell US$ 137 million.

Foreign direct investment in the country was US$ 829 million, barely 1% of the annual Gross Domestic Product, when neighboring Peru and Colombia handle ranges of 4% and 6% of GDP.

The technical secretary of the Fiscal Policy Observatory, Jaime Carrera, estimated that the future president will receive a condition “extremely delicate”.

The fiscal deficit – the difference between income and expenses of the State – that the new administration will inherit is around US$ 5,000 million, according to the economic analyst, to which must be added the payment of amortizations and interests of the public debt for about US$ 7,000 million.

At the offer fair to convince the Ecuadorians who have launched the eight candidates for the presidential chair, there is no shortage of mentions that they can get the country out of the jam, but in their speeches none of them delve into how they will comply.

In the streets, citizens are torn between disappointment and little hope.

“I do not see a path or a light for our country”lamented Aracely Sandoval, a 46-year-old teacher, who does not see any good option in any of the candidates. “The decline of values ​​in politicians and in the people who represent us has struck down our prospects for growth,” commented.

The problem of ungovernability will not end at the polls, according to the analysis of Santiago Cahuasquí, an analyst and professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the SEK International University. “Unfortunately, a period of little governance capacity for the next government and little capacity of the Legislature to put together an agenda that solves the country’s problems is inaugurating,” said.

Along the same lines, Diego Pérez, a professor and security analyst at the Institute for Higher National Studies (IAEN), considered that a country awaits the new ruler that has lost state control capacity and a “prevailing notion of impunity and inefficiency of the institutions”, that add up to a complex context of “decomposition of the state”.

“It is not about getting a hero to sit in Carondelet; This problem is not solved in a period of government nor is it solved by one person, everyone must be involved” and redirect the forces towards generational and structural problems such as poverty, he asserted.

Source: AP