Few people can say that they have been closer to all the Ecuadorian presidents of the last hundred years than the Salazar family. From the Amazonas Hairdresser, in the commercial basement of the Palacio de Carondelet, the presidential residence, Clara Salazar has seen a country change from the Plaza Grande, kilometer zero of the Ecuadorian capital, while her father cut the hair of the neighbors. Above all, she remembers the tranquility that she felt and that there was always some clueless person who remembered to cut their hair at eight o’clock at night, with the city in the dark. Now the closure is thrown at five. As the sun begins to set, the square empties. “People run home out of fear,” Salazar explains as she shaves the sides of a boy’s head. From the basement of the president’s house to the last corner of Ecuador, insecurity is the monotheme of this country that believed itself safe from violence and that on Sunday will vote for its next president with fear in its body.
In the midst of the electoral silence established by law and without polls since August 10, hairdressers can function as a social thermometer. While the hairdresser Salazar tells aloud that with former president Rafael Correa everything was “much better” – for which she will vote for the correísta candidate Luisa González – Alba Castro, 60, enters through the door. The woman loudly announces that she has come to make her husband handsome and then sentences: “on Sunday we bury socialism that wants to lead us to the abyss.” Salazar receives her with a smile (a client is a client) and responds kindly but without moving his face: “let’s wait for the result”. Mrs. Castro does not listen to her: “I am going to vote for our angel who is in heaven: Fernando Villavicencio.”
If these elections had been about the possible return of Correísmo to power since May, now they are about the shooting of candidate Fernando Villavicencio as he left a rally on August 9. A death that showed Ecuadorians the depth of the pit of violence into which they have been delving in the last three years. Villavicencio was not a favorite to go to the second round, although he had become known for his denunciations against corruption and organized crime, which had directly threatened him. A friend of his, the journalist Christian Zurita, will replace Villavicencio on Sunday, but without material time for changes, the 13.5 million voters will see the face and name of the dead candidate on the ballot.
It is impossible to measure the effects of the assassination in the electoral race. The last published ones kept Luisa González in the lead, although far from a victory in the first round (around 30%). The unknown, if the polls do not fail, is who will accompany her to the polls in October among the other seven candidates. The violent campaign could ultimately benefit Otto Sonnenholzner, former vice president of Lenín Moreno (2017-2021), and Jan Topic, the so-called Ecuadorian bukele, precisely because of their heavy-handed bets against insecurity.
Patricia Toasa would not like either of them to reach the Presidency. From her mobile stall selling soft drinks, sweets and cigarettes, she has been touring the city for 33 years. She often touches a privileged corner of the Plaza Grande, from where she has witnessed the entrances and exits of the country’s highest officials in Carondelet. She’s seen them all, but only one spoke to her once, she says with a twinkle in her eye. It would be a Saturday between 2007 and 2017. President Correa has just finished Saturday and back at the Palace he stopped with Toasa, called her compañerita and kissed her. “What president is going to kiss me!” She laughs, showing gold-rimmed teeth. And that kiss is well worth his eternal vote, because although Correa went to Belgium in 2017 and has not returned to Ecuador due to a bribery conviction, the former president continues to manage his party. To vote for González is to vote for Correa. Martyr for some and executioner for others, the former vice president continues to star in national politics.
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These early elections came at the best time for Correísmo since the fall from grace of its leader. The dissolution of the Ecuadorian Assembly and the call for early elections decreed by the president, Guillermo Lasso, -the so-called cross death- in the month of May to avoid a political trial against him for alleged corruption found the strongest correísmo of the last years. The Citizen Revolution movement, which Correa runs remotely, had just won local and regional elections in February. The former president felt that Lasso was giving him victory on a platter. That self-sufficiency partially cracked in the last days after the murder of Villavicencio, where a more nervous Correa than usual was seen. Uncertainty had already gripped the country.
“Who are we voting for?” asks Imelda Chango, 69, as she grabs the hand of Reyna Morocho, 26, dressed in glitter and with a sash that reads: Miss Star Ecuador 2023. This miss walks through the center of Quito taking pictures with young and old because he is preparing, he explains, for the international contest to be held in Barcelona. Chango entrusts himself to her as an apparition and Morocho, as if he were before the jury of the contest, responds without risking himself for any candidate: “Ecuador is on its knees, crime has reached a place that cannot be, someone has to get us out of here”. Mrs. Chango is satisfied with the answer. “We are terrified, but there is a God in heaven who will guide us,” she adds.
Quito is still the quietest area in the country, although violence is already beginning to permeate its streets and shops. The most violent focus is in Guayaquil and in the coastal provinces, where the country’s outlet to the Pacific turns Ecuador into a territory coveted by Mexican and Colombian drug trafficking groups. So far in 2023, 4,574 violent deaths have been registered, while 2022 closed with the highest number in history, with 4,600, double that of 2021. At the current rate, by the end of this year it could reach a rate of crime rate of 40 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, a rate that would place it among the most violent countries in the world.
In Guayaquil, the country’s second city, the climate is unbreathable. Ashly Silva is the mother of four children who have been expelled by violence from her home on Isla Trinitaria, south of Guayaquil, where the shootings and deaths number in the hundreds. She has been working cleaning houses since her husband was murdered by micro-trafficking networks a year ago and she only asks for a candidate who has “the mettle to face drug traffickers,” reports Carolina Mella. Although she does not opt for any, she thinks that correísmo lives from the past and that the country has to look to the future with one primary objective: to end the killings.
The more than likely second round, which would be held on October 15, will name the president who will have to deal with an uncertain scenario in a short space of time. These elections do not mark the beginning of a new legislature, but rather the next president will finish Lasso’s term, so he will only be in power for 18 months. Little time for a president that Ecuadorians ask nothing less than to give them back a country that they no longer recognize. The taxi driver Luis Noboa recounts: “Never of the never we saw this. Neither the dismemberments, nor the hanging bodies, nor the vaccines… We didn’t even know that this cross-death thing existed!
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