Ecuador: between the dispute over the waiver and the …

From Quito

Five days after the presidential and legislative elections in Ecuador, the National Electoral Council (CNE) has not yet finished counting 100% of the minutes. However, With 99.88% of the minutes polled and 98.81% calculated, it has been confirmed that Guillermo Lasso will enter the second round with 19.79% of the vote, and Yaku Pérez, with 19.46%, will be in third place.

Pérez, in the context of the delay in the official announcement of the CNE, denounced the existence of fraud and launched a series of actions. “Yesterday, the fraud that was preparing a few weeks before was consummated (…) perhaps we already have the contemporary Nostradamus, the former president Correa, he even anticipated with almost precise figures how much Lasso will have, how much we and how much Mr. Arauz, ”said candidate Pachakutik on the outskirts of the CNE in Quito.

According to Pérez, there would be an alliance between Correa, Lasso and Jaime Nebot, leader of the Christian Social Party (PSC) allied to CREO in Lasso’s candidacy. “Mr. Lasso only because of an ego that wants to go to the second round, he knows he is not going to beat Mr. Arauz, he is playing the game of correismo, Correa cleverly makes Lasso and Nebot fall into the trap,” he declared in front of a group of supporters who set up a vigil in front of the electoral power.

Thus, according to Pérez, he should not only enter the first round, but he would have won instead of Andrés Arauz, since they would have stolen “ten points” in “a blatant fraud”. Pérez had already made the same statement on Monday, when he filed a complaint for election theft, which so far has not been accompanied by evidence.

Faced with this situation, the Pachakutik party announced that it would ask the CNE to count “vote by vote” in the provinces of Pichinchas, Guayas, Manabí, Los Ríos, Esmeraldas, El Oro and Bolívar, “where it has put its hand. “, will bring a criminal complaint to Guayas for the crime of electoral fraud, go to the Comptroller General of the nation to request an audit, and present the complaint to the Secretary of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, in the Inter-Court of Human Rights and the United Nations.

However, while Pérez accused Lasso of complicity with Correa, he took up the proposal made Wednesday by Xavier Hervas, of the democratic left (ID). -which came in fourth place with 15.74% of the vote- to form a front between the four political forces, Pachakutik, ID, CREO-PSC, to face the citizen revolution. Yes indeed, Pérez said that once the count has been made, “whoever the winner is, we dialogue and stand up against corruption”, that is, against correismo.

While it is still uncertain how the demand for a vote count before the CNE will evolve, other legal actions and, perhaps, a process of protests, over the days the possibility that an alliance will face the waiver. A possibility not only present in the speeches, as the tension of Pérez between accusing Lasso of fraud and inviting him to lead a common front, but also in the attempt to form an alliance between Pachakutik and CREO-PSC in the National Assembly for to carry out the presidency of the legislature.

The development of the scenario revealed the central point shared by most Ecuadorian political forces: preventing the return of the citizens’ revolution to government.. This is a goal shared, in turn, by the US government involved behind the scenes, as evidenced by President Lenín Moreno’s visit to Washington a few days before the election, where he held meetings with officials of the central administration and both sides facing Latin America.

This confluence of national and international power factors around the electoral moment would not be new, but rather the continuity of a series of actions undertaken during the last four years against the correismo of the government, the judicial, electoral media, which is are translated into persecution. , imprisonment, disqualification and exile. Pérez, who now denounces a fraud, could, within a few days or weeks, be part of the anti-correista electoral alliance with government projection. Will the social base that voted for him support Lasso? This is one of the many questions on the table.