• Latin America Ecuador: uncertainty and 'cross death' after months of boycott of fugitive Correa
  • Profile Guillermo Lasso, the 'misunderstood' president of Ecuador

Absolute calm in Ecuador. The dissolution of the National Assembly and the proposal for presidential and legislative elections for August, in the absence of what the Constitutional Court decides, has generated neither protests nor disturbances in a society that lives with its back turned to politicians.

The trial against the president is already history, while the electoral hornet's nest grows and the first dabbles for the nominations. In his first interview for CNN, Guillermo Lasso justified the implementation of the "cross death" to stop the "macabre plan to take control of state institutions to produce impunity and give viability to the return of a president who has been sentenced for corruption."

The conservative president, who will govern the coming months through economic emergency decrees, has pointed in this way to his great enemy: Rafael Correa, leader of Citizen Revolution and main beneficiary so far of the current political crisis. Despite the president's statements, Correa is closer to his return to the country through the front door, as already happened to Evo Morales after the victory of Luis Arce. Or Lula da Silva after getting out of prison.

The first point of the plan has been more than fulfilled, by undermining the presidency of Lasso until he executed the cross death, with the consequent call for elections. The surprising victory of Lasso in the 2021 runoff, when he managed to pass to the second round by a scant 0.36% of the votes over the indigenous candidate, Yaku Pérez, ruined the political design put in place by Correa.

But the revolutionary leader very soon took advantage of the window opened by the rupture between the ruling party and the Social Christian Party (PSC), a right-wing populist party with which he sealed the unnatural alliance that forced the current conjuncture.

The next step is to choose a suitable candidate to win the presidency this year, facilitate his triumphant return and make way for him in the 2025 candidacy. "Right now it is not known who will be chosen, but it will be anyone who facilitates his return. It is the million-dollar question, the leader will have the last word," Michel Levi, coordinator of the Andean Center for International Affairs, told EL MUNDO.

Correa already has a powerful political power base, with the only parliamentary group that until its dissolution remained compact, with the new mayors and prefects in Quito and Guayaquil and with tentacles deployed in the judiciary. The strategy is to whitewash the past of this fugitive from Ecuadorian justice, sentenced to eight years in prison for corruption, who serves as one of the main advisors of Nicolás Maduro and who was also one of the television stars of Vladimir Putin's channel in Latin America.

"If we go to elections, we are going to crush him at the polls," Correa predicted before the possibility of a direct duel between the candidate who decides and his great enemy, if he finally decides to run.

  • Ecuador

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