Ecuador: campaign, operations and complaints | Gone …

D’Azuay, Ecuador

Andrés Arauz is received in a small town in the province of Azuay, in the mountains. People approach, take pictures, give him a hug, raise their index fingers to indicate one, that is to say the number of his electoral list, there is euphoria. In the background, the green rain of the mountains, the end of another day of marathon campaign which brings the candidate to the citizen revolution across towns, cities, meetings and talks.

There are less than two weeks left before the waiver of April 11, the last line where, as we know, decisive electoral percentages can be defined, in particular in a contest where the null vote is around 25%. Arauz, who leads the polls, faces Guillermo Lasso, the banking candidate, well known for his past as president of Bank Guayaquil, one of the largest in the country.

The campaign dynamic is ceaseless, both in the different provinces and, in turn, in one of the central territories for any ongoing campaign: social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube and Google for advertisements that appear on pages or applications. This is where one of the keys comes into play, the possibility of reaching different audiences, of breaking one’s own circles, of designing specific messages with big data precision.

This field is central for each candidate, in particular for Lasso, because of the need to build an identity different from the one he has been during his more than twenty years of political and economic life, two spheres deeply interwoven in his case. The lasso must appear as close to indigenous peoples, women, young people, concerned about the social majority, workers, the environment, empathetic, in what constitutes a simulation / deception operation reminiscent of that carried out by Mauricio Macri in your election campaign. It is no coincidence that their advisor is the same person: Jaime Durán Barba.

The objective of the media operation is to build a candidate with a project different from the one he is leading, and, in turn, to erase both his past and his present. Regarding the first, he seeks to present him as innocent in the main crisis the country experienced, in 1999, known as the banking holiday, when thousands of Ecuadorians had to emigrate from the country as the banks accumulated Fortunes, like Bank Guayaquil, It has grown from a net worth of $ 54 million in 1998 to $ 75 million in 2002, according to data from the Superintendency of Banks.

Regarding the latter, his political campaign seeks to present him as a stranger to the current government of Lenín Moreno, and to hide the repetition of what happened in 1999: his personal enrichment in times of national crisis. Indeed, according to the internal revenue department, its income in 2020 was 6.4 million dollars, higher than 2019 with 2 million, 2018 with 2.3 million or 2017, with 4.3 million. During these years, simultaneously, 130,000 civil servants and 600,000 in the private sphere were made redundant.

But Lasso has not only increased his assets by millions, but has also been and continues to be part of the policy design of the Moreno government. This is particularly visible in the current attempt to privatize the Central Bank of Ecuador. (ECB) promoted by Moreno through the so-called Defense of Dollarization Law, a project that aims to empower the ECB from executive power and put it in the hands of the private sector, an attempt that comes from the 1990s.

The bill, which had already been rejected twice by the Legislative Administration Council of the National Assembly, was accepted on Monday, to be dealt with urgently within the legislative power. Moreno / the bank’s attempt is one of the last strong economic maneuvers before leaving government on May 24, which, if successful, would leave the next executive in even greater fragility and his hands tied. She is not the only one, she is also seeking, for example, to complete the privatization of the Esmeraldas refinery before leaving the presidential palace in Carondelet.

This government program is the one that the banking sector is running behind the scenes, that is, that of Lasso, now turned into a candidate with a poncho and Amazonian paintings. His campaign, both public and dirty, has, as in the first round, strong funding which, according to Arauz comes from illegal channels: “this huge deployment with you going, advertising on radio stations, a network campaign with trolls located in different countries of the world (…) he is paid with the resources of the depositors of the Bank of Guayaquil ”, for which he filed a criminal complaint for misappropriation of bank funds.

It is expected that the remaining less than two weeks will be crossed by various smear operations and a dirty campaign against Arauz, as well as the preparation via the pollsters – in particular Cedatos, de Lasso – of the ground for the day of the poll, in an action similar to that of the presidential election of 2017. On this occasion, the maneuver consisted in installing a victory at the Lasso in advance, and announce the winner early on election day through various channels, such as Ecuavisa, to create the hoax of his victory followed by the fraud complaint.

This vertiginous character in rural areas and activities does not seem to have any correlation in society, however. Quito, as well as Cuenca – capital of Azuay – do not offer the image of a country in the countryside, and daily conversations do not capture electoral passions either. This low political expectation appears to be another legacy of Moreno, which will go down in the pages of history as a model case of political betrayal.