Daniel Noboa wins another term as Ecuador’s murder rate soars

On April 13th Daniel Noboa, Ecuador’s conservative president, trounced his left-wing opponent, Luisa González, to win a second term. A 37-year-old heir to a banana fortune, Mr Noboa has been in office only since November 2023, when he was elected to finish the mandate of an unpopular president who had resigned. Since then he has hammered Ecuador’s drug gangs, sidelined rivals and ramped up spending on welfare. He also puffed up his friendship with Donald Trump, whom he met in Mar-a-Lago just before the election. Mr Noboa is only the second president to win re-election since Ecuador became a democracy in 1979.

In the election’s first round, in February, he ran neck-and-neck with Ms González, a lawyer widely seen as a proxy for Rafael Correa, a once-powerful president now living in exile to avoid a prison sentence for corruption. (Mr Correa denies all charges and says he is being politically persecuted.) But Mr Noboa easily won the run-off, with 56% of the vote. His party now has a chance of forming a majority in Congress.

His agenda, however, is unclear. He often seems to make it up as he goes along. In 2023 he campaigned as a centrist outsider, though his father is one of Latin America’s richest men and a serial presidential candidate. In office Mr Noboa has tacked to the right, renewing a state of emergency, sending the army onto the streets and into prisons, and spending $52m on a high-security jail. To pay for his war on gangs he has slashed petrol subsidies and raised VAT from 12% to 15%.

At the same time he has splurged on welfare and handouts, which may have helped clinch his victory. Since January he has announced 14 new welfare programmes at a cost of over $500m. His new grants include a one-off payment of $1,000 to 100,000 small-business owners. He has also extended a generous make-work programme for unemployed 18-to-29-year-olds. Spending in the first quarter of 2025 was almost 20% higher than in the same period last year. Such measures, says Mr Noboa, will boost growth “by more than 4%” this year. The central bank and IMF disagree. They both expect growth of only 1.5% or less.

Sceptics question Mr Noboa’s temperament, and his respect for the law. According to Ecuador’s constitution, he ought to have taken a leave of absence to campaign for re-election, letting the vice-president temporarily assume his duties. He did not. The election authorities barred some of his rivals, such as Jan Topic, a tough-on-crime candidate, from running for the presidency. Mr Noboa has surrounded himself with family and friends in office. His mother was elected to Congress. Some Ecuadorians are wary of his promise to call a constitutional convention.

Yet Ms González’s shortcomings proved harder to overcome. Her mentor, Mr Correa, who was in office from 2007 to 2017, intimidated his opponents, hamstrung the media, and relied on a commodities boom and Chinese loans for growth. From exile he still balefully influences Ecuadorian politics, furiously posting to his 4m followers on X, a social-media platform, and hosting a show on RT, a Kremlin-funded TV outlet.

In a TV debate held before the election, Ms Gonzáles justified recognising the dictatorial regime of Mr Correa’s ally, Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela. After the run-off, she refused to concede defeat, saying Ecuador was now “living in a dictatorship”.

This was the third consecutive presidential race that Mr Correa’s party has lost. His “brand has become toxic”, says Will Freeman of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The party’s old guard do not want to let go of Mr Correa as their leader because “they might get thrown out with him,” he says.

Mr Noboa’s presidency will be judged by whether he can restore security. Though murders fell from 45 per 100,000 people in 2023 to 39 last year, the numbers in January and February were the highest on record. “For now Ecuadorians are giving Noboa the benefit of the doubt,” says Sebastián Hurtado, a political analyst in Quito, the capital. If results do not come soon, Ecuadorians may sour on him, too. ■

Sign up to El Boletín, our subscriber-only newsletter on Latin America, to understand the forces shaping a fascinating and complex region.