Car horns in Quito blared in celebration Sunday as banana empire heir Daniel Noboa, 35, became violence-riddled Ecuador’s youngest president-elect ever.With 90 per cent of votes counted, the electoral authority announced Noboa as the victor.
Moments earlier, socialist rival Luisa Gonzalez conceded defeat and offered her “profound congratulations” to Noboa, “because this is democracy.”Addressing supporters in Quito, Gonzales also said she would not be claiming fraud.
Ecuadorans voted for 10 hours Sunday with no reports of violence in a country gripped by a bloody drug war and a rash of political assassinations that cut short the bid of a popular candidate.
About 100,000 police and soldiers were deployed to keep the vote safe, while Noboa and Gonzalez both cast their votes in bulletproof vests just weeks after a rival was murdered.Both candidates had vowed to prioritize the escalating violence.
“May we elect the best president because (he or she) will govern a country that is destroyed… to address all these problems such as insecurity,” Indigenous voter Ramiro Duchitanga told AFP in Cuenca in Ecuador’s south.
“It is a critical election,” added Freddy Escobar, a popular 49-year-old singer, citing crime as his main worry. “I am voting in fear, not knowing what will happen.”
The main concerns of Ecuadorans, according to recent polls, are crime and violence in a country where the murder rate quadrupled in the four years to 2022.
– Drug violence –
Long a peaceful haven between major cocaine exporters Colombia and Peru, Ecuador has seen violence explode in recent years as enemy gangs with links to Mexican and Colombian cartels vie for control.
The fighting has seen at least 460 inmates massacred in prisons since February 2021 — many beheaded or burned alive in mass riots.
The bloodbath has spilled into the streets, with gangs dangling headless corpses from city bridges and detonating car bombs outside police stations in a show of force.
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