By Alexandra Valencia
QUITO (Reuters) – Ecuadorean leftist Luisa Gonzalez says her plans to spend on social welfare and impose harsher penalties for criminals will work better than what she calls the ad-hoc policies of incumbent President Daniel Noboa, but she faces an uphill battle to win Sunday’s presidential election.
Gonzalez, who lost to Noboa in a 2023 snap election when he was voted in to serve the remainder of his predecessor’s term, is the candidate for the Citizens’ Revolution party led by her mentor, former President Rafael Correa.
Several polls point to an April run-off between 47-year-old lawyer Gonzalez, who would be the first woman elected Ecuador’s president, and business heir Noboa, 37. Others have Noboa winning in the first round.
“The country cannot improvise,” Gonzalez said during a radio interview in late January. “It requires knowledge, a team and experience, that’s clearly what we have in Citizens’ Revolution and with Luisa Gonzalez.”
Gonzalez says she would respond to Ecuador’s drug trade-fueled crime wave with major military and police operations and that she would pursue allegedly corrupt judges and prosecutors. She also wants to construct renewable energy projects and provide low-interest credit for small and women-run businesses, as well as increase social spending in violent areas.
Gonzalez and 14 other candidates have excoriated Noboa over continued violence on the streets, but none have suggested a major security strategy that differs significantly from the tough-on-crime measures he is already enacting.
Gonzalez first met Correa at a government event in the Andean city of Riobamba. She began working with his office in 2008, going on to lead two government secretariats, and was elected to the legislature in 2021.
Correa, who governed until 2017 and now lives in Belgium, was sentenced in 2020 to eight years in prison on corruption charges he says are political persecution.
Some legislature candidates for Citizens’ Revolution have said Correa will return to Ecuador if Gonzalez wins and that former vice-president Jorge Glas, who is in prison on corruption convictions, will be free to take up a Mexican offer of asylum.
“Luisa is an intelligent woman and totally capable of getting us out of the mire we are trapped in,” said Mayito Villacis, 20, in the coastal city of Guayaquil. “We must recover our country and erase Noboa from our history.”
Gonzalez, who describes herself as a single mother, animal lover and sportswoman, has said she, not Correa, will take decisions if she is elected president.
“I won’t stop until Ecuador has been revived,” Gonzalez said in a campaign video. “Whenever they tell me something is impossible, that’s when I’m most convinced it’s possible.”
(Reporting by Alexandra Valencia in Quito; Additional reporting by Yury Garcia in Guayaquil; Writing by Julia Symmes Cobb; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
