THEEcuadorr will have a third right-wing government in a row, even if this time the president has a new profile: the outsider Daniel Noboa at 35 he becomes the youngest head of state in the history of the South American country. He succeeds Guillermo Lasso, who, overwhelmed by two cases of impeachment, called early elections, the run-off of which was thus won by the entrepreneur and former deputy with 52% of the votes, ahead of the centre-left candidate Luisa Gonzalez. After the socialist decade with the presidency of Rafael Correa, now in asylum in Belgium after being convicted of corruption, the right is consolidating in Ecuador and in reality it is doing so with a son of art: Daniel is in fact son of Alvaro Noboa Pontòn, a former politician defeated five times in the presidential elections (three of which by Correa), and known in Ecuador as the "banana magnate".
Ecuador: Noboa in office for just 18 months
Furthermore, the handover between the Noboas was not just political: Noboa senior left part of his economic empire to the son in tax havens, to be precise in Panama, according to what emerged from the Pandora Papers. Ecuadorian law prohibits doing this, but apparently Daniel Noboa's image has not been tarnished nor has it prevented him from running for the leadership of the country: in fact he will be the president for the next year and a half, when we return back to the polls for the natural expiration of the legislature. Noboa thus presents himself as a liberal profile, which he will defend above all the close relationship with the United States , dollarization of the economy Ecuadorean: the issue in South America is very hot, given that on October 22nd there will be voting in Argentina and the far-right candidate Javier Milei would also like to take Buenos Aires on the same path as Ecuador and El Salvador, currently the only two countries Latin Americans to no longer have their own currency.
The Dollarization of Poverty
In these countries, however,dollarisation is not working, indeed Noboa will first of all have to get his hands on economic policies and face the resurgence of poverty, which rose again to 27%, once again approaching the historic highs reached during the pandemic, when it exceeded 30%. In Ecuador the majority of jobs (52%) are precarious or illegal, a higher percentage, for example, than the high one in neighboring Brazil (40%). The Noboa recipe in this sense is to protectdollarization, support credit to small and medium-sized businesses, grant tax incentives and above all return to attract investment foreign. The young scion, educated at Harvard in the United States, also promised the creation of many jobs and to facilitate access to universities, which he considers a barrier to the violence that is literally spreading across the country.
Noboa will have to deal with the drug trafficking emergency and rampant violence
During the election campaign it was indeed brutal a candidate was assassinated in the middle of a rally and the murder rate across the country exploded, reaching the highest ever: in 2022, 26 murders were recorded per 100 thousand inhabitants, compared to 7,8 in 2020. The escalation is mainly due to the drug trafficking, whose business in Ecuador is on the rise, which involves guerrillas and score-settling even in prisons, to the point that Noboa has gone so far as to propose the prison ships, to further isolate the most dangerous criminals. The new president therefore promises the tough fight against crime, in full collaboration with Washington, which is increasingly keeping an eye on Ecuador as Traffic transit country especially cocaine, which has recently returned to worrying levels. Suffice it to say that in neighboring Colombia, production has reached its highest level since the time of Pablo Escobar, and the (illegal) export of Cocaine now yields more than oil.
