Ecuador: Between the disagreement over the ballot and …

From Quito

Five days after the presidential and legislative elections in Ecuador, the National Electoral Council (CNE) has not yet finished counting 100% of the minutes. However, With a scrutiny of 99.88% of the minutes and a count of 98.81%, Guillermo Lasso is confirmed to enter the second round with 19.79% of the vote, and Yaku Pérez with 19.46%And the It will be in third place.

Perez, in the context of the delay in the official announcement of CNE, denounced the existence of fraud and initiated a series of actions. “Yesterday, the fraud that had been preparing for a few weeks before that was completed (…) we may already have Nostradamus the contemporary, the former president of Korea, he has even predicted in almost exact numbers how much Lasso will be, how much we are and how much Mr. Arauz”, Confirmed Pachakutek candidate in the suburbs of the National Electoral Council, in Quito.

According to Perez, there will be an alliance between Correa, Laso, and Jaime Nebot, the leader of the Christian Social Party allied with the CREO in the Lasso nomination. “Mr. Lasso is only because of the ego that wants to go to the second round, he knows he will not defeat Mr. Araese, he plays the game of Correa, with cleverness that makes Lasso and Nebot fall into a trap,” he said in front of a group of followers who held a protest in front of the electoral authority.

Thus, according to Perez, he should not only enter the first round, but would have won in place of Andres Arouse, because they would have stolen “ten points” in “blatant fraud”. Perez had already made the same statement on Monday, when he filed a complaint about election theft, something that was not yet supported by evidence.

Faced with this situation, the Pachacutek Party announced that it would ask the National Electoral Council to count “vote by vote” in the provinces of Pichinchas, Guayas, Manabe, Los Rios, Esmeraldas, El Oro and Bolívar, “where it got hold.” The complaint will be submitted to the Secretary of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, at the American Court of Human Rights and the United Nations.

However, while Perez accused Lasso of colluding with Correa, the suggestion made on Wednesday was adopted by Xavier Hervas, of the Democratic Left (ID). – which came in fourth place with 15.74% of the vote – to form a front between the four political forces, Pachakutik, ID, CREO-PSC, to confront the citizen’s revolution. And therefore, Perez asserted that once the recount was carried out, “who wins, we debate and make a front against corruption,” that is, against Correismo.

Although it remains uncertain how the vote count request will evolve before the National Electoral Council, other legal measures, and possibly the protest process, as days go by, face the possibility that the ballot coalition will face. There is a possibility not only in speeches, such as Perez’s tension between accusing Lasso of fraud and calling for a common front, but also in trying to forge an alliance between Pachacutec and CREO-PSC in the National Assembly to achieve the presidency of the legislature.

The development of the scenario revealed the common focal point of most of the political forces in Ecuador: preventing the return of the citizen’s revolution to the government.. It is a goal shared in turn by the United States government, which is involved behind the scenes, as evidenced by President Lenin Moreno’s visit to Washington days before the elections, where he held meetings with central administration officials and both parties facing Latin America.

This convergence of national and international power factors around the electoral moment will not be new, but rather a continuation of a series of measures taken during the past four years against Coresmo from the government, the judiciary, elections and the media, which translated into persecution. Imprisonment, disqualification and exile. Peres, who is now denouncing fraud, could be, in a few days or a few weeks, part of the anti-Corista electoral alliance with the overthrow of the government. Will the social base that voted for him support the Lasso? It is one of several questions on the table.