Noboa must find a way to make Ecuador safer but avoid resorting to military repression
Daniel Noboa’s reelection in Ecuador on April 13 was remarkable. At thirty-seven, he is one of the youngest heads of government ever to have won reelection in a free and fair election, having obtained 55.7 percent of valid votes and beaten opposition leader Luisa González by more than eleven percentage points. In addition, Noboa overcame a long-standing anti-incumbency trend across Latin America: Of the twenty-seven free and fair presidential elections held in Latin America since 2018, incumbent parties and candidates were thrown out of office twenty-two times, reflecting voters’ dissatisfaction with governments irrespective of ideological orientation. Finally, Noboa’s first sixteen months in office (since he served the remainder of his predecessor’s term after a snap election in October 2023) were turbulent and controversial, shaped by blackouts that roiled the country, high-profile government infighting, clashes with the courts, and an unprecedented security crisis—far from the ideal scenario to win reelection.
Yet it was precisely Ecuador’s seemingly intractable security challenge, marked by high levels of violence, that allowed Noboa to project himself as a law-and-order candidate unafraid of implementing tough measures, even when rights groups pointed to human rights abuses by security forces and questioned the efficacy of his iron fist strategy. Noboa’s approach involved militarizing the fight against organized crime, declaring states of emergency that allowed soldiers to search homes without warrants, and constructing a security prison inspired by El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison built by President Nayib Bukele. Although jailing thousands led to a brief and incremental decline in violence, deadly crime has surged again to unprecedented levels, pointing to the deep structural challenges in Ecuador that Noboa must strive to address.
Over the past six years, Ecuador, not long ago one of Latin America’s safest countries, has seen its homicide rate surge eightfold, surpassing even Colombia and Mexico. Strategically located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest cocaine producers, Ecuador…
