Trump Ally Noboa Reelected in an Ecuador Torn Apart by Gangs
Ecuador’s electoral authority declared President Daniel Noboa the winner of Sunday’s election, giving him a full four-year term to try to rein in cocaine violence and rouse the economy from its lost decade.
Socialist opposition candidate Luisa González declined to concede, however, and demanded a recount.
With 91% of ballots tallied, investor favorite Noboa, 37, led González by 55.9% to 44.1%. Electoral authority chief Diana Atamaint said that the gap of more than 1 million votes and an “irreversible trend” made Noboa the victor.
González told supporters in Quito that she didn’t recognize the official vote count, which she said didn’t tally with polling data. She would need to produce evidence of irregularities for the electoral authorities to consider a recount.
Noboa’s victory will likely cheer owners of the Andean nation’s sovereign bonds, which are the worst performers in emerging markets this year. The slump began after González did much better than polls had forecast in the first round, raising the possibility of the return to power of a party that oversaw a debt default in 2008.
The nation of 18 million people was close to the abyss when Noboa took over as interim president in 2023, with drug gangs gunning down politicians, nationwide blackouts and tens of thousands of people trying to flee to the US. Sixteen months later, none of those problems has been fixed and the outlook is hardly any rosier.
But Noboa, a wealthy 37-year-old businessman on good terms with Donald Trump, persuaded voters to give him more time to halt the country’s slide. He won helped by a social-media campaign that featured him working out, dancing and bragging about his tough approach to fighting crime.
Noboa might seem an unlikely figure to lead the fight against the powerful gangs that have overrun the country in alliance with mafias fr
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