I live in Ecuador, I wanted Luisa to win, I campaigned for her.
The anti gay adoption and anti trans education letter can be seen here: https://www.vistazo.com/politica/elecciones-ecuador-2025/2025-03-11-segunda-vuelta-ecuador-daniel-noboa-luisa-gonzalez-rechazan-ideologia-genero-FM8943016
The segment of the debate where she said she’d recognize Maduro to deport Venezuelans can be seen here: https://youtube.com/shorts/wiSuQI7QE9Y
I supported Luisa and the Citizens Revolution Party because they previously renegotiated oil contracts to increase state revenue and they gave us massive infrastructure spending, tripled the minimum wage and the country benefitted hugely from their administration.
Noboa is a failure and a tool of the imperialists, an amerikan citizen himself, he’s overseen a doubling of the crime rate and given impunity to the military for its actions massacring civilians in Nueva Prosperina and Socio Vivienda, marginal neighborhoods of Guayaquil. Noboa plans to sell off state oil production for personal gain and this will permanently damage Ecuador’s development prospects.
I understand the consequences of this election first hand, I have lived here since the beginning of Rafael Correa’s administration, I saw a country move forward for a decade and I’ve suffered the consequences of the last eight years of maladministration.
I want to see the left regain power, I want the peace and moderate prosperity we enjoyed under the left to return. But I am also willing to criticise my own side for the obviously failed strategy of attempting to move right on certain issues.
I am a Correista, I support Rafael Correa, the man who gave us a constitution with universal citizenship and openness to people from all parts of the world to come here and enjoy an equality under the law - something that I benefitted from as a migrant. To see the party candidate proclaim an intention to deport Venezuelans was a betrayal. If we are going to regain power, we must recognize our mistakes. Fraud it was, but the support for Noboa is not entirely fictional, the rejection of the project by millions of Ecuadorians is real, we must deal with these issues so we can hope to regain the presidency.
Oh I understand the need to be skeptical, much criticism is unprincipled and opportunistic. I know that these criticisms that I have raised are not being covered outside the country and received little attention here either.
The debate is illustrative of the failure to clearly offer an alternative to the failed model the country is currently following. If you understand Spanish and want to see why we lost, just go watch the debate - Luisa attacked Noboa but failed to offer a clear plan for how she’d do better, when asked about her economic plans she said “she’d eliminate corruption” and then launched into another attack on Noboa for his corrupt acts. If she was a new candidate with no baggage this may have worked, but the media have spent the last 18 years tying the party to acts of corruption.
Rafael Correa has a talk show, where a week before the election he decided to talk about the inevitable downfall of the dollar in the world with Ricardo Patiño - they were correct in their analysis but the thing was taken out of context and to the average low information voter - all that was heard, is these people want to take our dollars away. Give the 96% approval of dollarization in Ecuador this was a massive communicational error.
Many mistakes were made. Blaming it all on the fraud will not help us. Even if we could prove we should have won, which we don’t have enough evidence for yet, we still couldn’t overturn the results because Noboa has control of the electoral authorities and courts.
Unfortunately we must accept the reality and make plans for the future. Powercuts and privatization are on the horizon, it’s a grim time and crying about fraud isn’t going to energize anyone except the base.