Noboa’s sweeping victory locks in militarization in Ecuador

Daniel Noboa supporters hold cutouts of his face during the campaign launch in the first round of elections in Guayaquil, Ecuador on January 10, 2025. Photo © Vicente Gaibor.

Opinion • Cristina Vega • April 24, 2025 • Leer en castellano

Ecuador’s April 13 presidential elections delivered a surprising majority for Daniel Noboa, in sharp contrast to the results of the first round of voting. The son of a banana magnate, Noboa clinched the presidency with an almost 12 point margin over Luisa González of the Citizen Revolution Party (RC).

The first round of voting ended in a technical tie between González and Noboa, with a difference of only 20,000 votes between them. Polls predicted a very narrow margin in the second around. After the results came in, González claimed election fraud without any evidence, but the National Electoral Council quickly settled the matter.

Noboa bagged an additional one million votes, concentrated in Quito, Guayaquil, and the central and southern highlands, in the second round. In contrast, González attracted only 158,000 new voters, winning only five of Ecuador’s 24 provinces.

This happened despite an agreement with the Pachakutik Party, which was expected to mobilize Indigenous, left, and environmentalist votes in a context marked by the advance of the far-right. Pachakutik’s candidate Leonidas Iza obtained 5.25 percent of the vote in the first round in February. As the campaign progressed, people who had leaned toward a null vote were expected to vote RC, given the country's dramatic crossroads.

González made a last-minute deal with Jan Topic, a militarist pre-candidate who had previously been disqualified by Noboa. In the end, support from Indigenous areas of the highlands ended up favoring Noboa, in large part due to his opposition to Correismo, the political current that González represents, and which continues to be a polarizing factor in Ecuadorean politics.

Presidential candidate Luisa González with a military and security personnel, rallies her supporters in Guayaquil during at her last campaign event during the first round of voting on February 6, 2025. Photo © Vicente Gaibor.

Militarization, paramilitarization, confusion

In provinces such as Guayas, Manabí, or Los Ríos, bloody deaths, disappearances, extortions, executions, and forced recruitment of adolescents and young people have expanded to such a degree that the population lives in a state of fear.

Organized crime and its state, business, financial, and political networks have grown at an unprecedented rate in Ecuador. As predicted, the declaration of internal armed conflict (in January 2024), the now common states of exception, militarization and increased army powers, and the alliance with foreign mercenary company Blackwater have not stopped the violence. Data shows an increase so far in 2025.

A resident of Durán, a municipality with a homicide rate among the highest in the world, explained to Ojalá, the increase and the brutality of murders has disproportionately impacted informal vendors and women who are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Locals have put up blockades that prevent people from driving through the streets at night, something that’s impossible in other areas of Durán, where there are no paved roads or basic services, where cabs don’t go, and where water is distributed by organized crime groups.

In the context of militarization and a growing number of victims, racism has been stoked by the government, and is used as a powerful mechanism for absorbing and channeling fear into a spectacularized iron fist. Even bystanders and shopkeepers who have survived massacres become suspected of having been up to something shady, says the resident we spoke to, provoking distrust and criminalization of their businesses among locals.

These attitudes of normalization of violence were patent in the disappearance and murder of four Afro-Ecuadorian children in the Malvinas neighborhood by the army in December of 2024.

When it comes to sowing fear and distrust among and towards the majority, the Noboa government came out ahead of the RC, which failed to break with the narrative of deadly violence or propose a long-term structural approach to the crisis that is critical of the underlying dynamics of accumulation.

The global rise of policing, prisons and racism projects a future in which it appears there is no horizon or hope, a future driven by death. In Ecuador it has taken on the persona of a young, white, hyper-rich candidate who promises to save good people from dark men who threaten national security.

A president on the campaign trail

The fact that Noboa didn’t step down as president during the campaign was the real fraud of this election. Not doing so allowed him access to unlimited state funds including bonuses, incentives and aid of various kinds under the mantle of public policy, which distributed to an increasingly impoverished population as well as to the armed forces.

In just a few weeks, Noboa gave out over $500,000,000 in short-term cash transfers, which were not part of the government budget and will contribute to increasing Ecuador’s indebtedness as we head towards recession, while doing nothing to meaningfully alleviate the country’s socio-economic problems.

In addition to the economic consequences of this type of clientelism, it also points to a deep erosion of Ecuador’s rights and public policy frameworks. Noboa short-circuited institutionality and the constitution, which is now vulnerable to rapid-fire reform in a process led by the powerful.

Noboa did not take the leave of absence that is mandatory while campaigning. He displaced and threatened the Vice-President who was supposed to occupy the presidency, and subordinated the National Electoral Council. If we consider this within the context of the practices of the global far-right, whose objective is not to dismantle the state, but to transform regulations and the administrative apparatus to benefit their political aims, we see that there is also a frontal attack on the institutionality of liberal democracy in Ecuador.

This has irritated many, and discredits elements of the state that were unquestioned in Ecuador until recently—the formal separation of powers, secularity, and the democratic process. It also feeds into the population’s distaste for government. Patriarchal presidentialism has become dominant, powered by decrees and personalistic marketing.

It’s a cardboard democracy. Noboa is a Ken doll (in different clothes). His government’s policies are erratic and improvised, but skillful in misrepresenting their opponents, who are accused of wanting to de-dollarize, of being part of Castro-Chavista authoritarianism, and a long list of similar claims. In doing so it managed to reverse its fortunes while setting up a government by and for elites.

Noboa represents the political tradition of individualistic, colonial charity marked by a logic of short-term gain and long-term pain.

A man is detained inside a house during a military operation on October 16, 2024 in Duran. Photo © Vicente Gaibor.

Citizen (and patriarchal) Revolution

Left out of most readings of the election is the panicked moralizing and fearmongering around sex and gender that played out across right-wing politics.

González's campaign claimed to be progressive. She dressed in blue and used “in favor of life” as a slogan —or is it “pro-life?”— but she failed to stand out from the right, a fact that worked in Noboa's favor. Last year, the president made threats to transform the Ministry of Women and Human Rights into the Ministry of Criminal Policy, withdrew education materials related to sexual and gender diversities, and treated women in his cabinet in a manner at once utilitarian and arrogant.

A constitutional sentence in a case of school bullying against a trans girl—with agitators deliberately trying to bring alive the ghost of “gender ideology”—laid the groundwork for the revival of neoconservative sexual morality during the campaign. The Minister of Education refused to implement the protections the ruling required, while the “Society and Family” platform demanded candidates sign a “Public Commitment to Children and Life” in the middle of the electoral campaign.

González did not take a personal position on this, or refute efforts to promote discriminatory attitudes against children who don’t fit into the imposed gender binary. She ignored the struggles of women who opt to end a pregnancy. Instead, she committed to key parts of the agenda pushed by reactionary evangelicals.

González opposed sexual and reproductive rights and was hostile to feminism during the campaign. She chose to present herself in the role of sacrificial and believing mother to whom respect is due, and which she demanded of Noboa in the electoral debate. 

The campaign was a lost opportunity to cultivate critical pedagogy that differentiates an anti-patriarchal left from those who are more comfortable with the anti-gender rhetoric spewed by the global right. The supposed corruption of childhood, blamed on an excess of diversities and feminisms, language around the “protection of the unborn,” and the disregard for feminist struggles against violence and for choice in motherhood in an environment of growing precarity, exploitation and impoverishment ended up being shared by all the candidates.

In this election RC showed the most conservative face of so-called progressivism. The lazy and disengaged position of the right was also on display. For Noboa, it was just another feather in his cap of anti-feminism.

What’s next

Noboa's ineptitude and his aggressive policy against the people are not debatable. We see proof of this in the blackouts, shortages in hospitals, increases in sales tax and fuel costs, rampant mining exploitation that’s increasingly intertwined with drug trafficking, the neglect of Ecuadorian migration in the face of Donald Trump, and more.

Even so, distrust in RC's past actions means the party is more associated with authoritarianism than the right itself. Its inability to mark a difference in key areas ended up damning the party. Unfortunately, this strengthens the current wave of authoritarian neoliberalism, or fascism, as it is increasingly called.

In this scenario, plural alliances of women, feminists, queer folks and young people from different territories and networks will be key to rebuilding broken social bonds and building resistance. As the girls and boys of Karibú and the Batukada Popular Guayaquil neighborhoods like Isla Trinitaria, Suburbio and Nigeria sing together: That's why, we’re going to take the people forward.”