The 35 year old Banana Empire heir Daniel Noboa, has become violence-riddled Ecuador’s youngest President-elect ever which has sparked widespread celebrations.
With 90 per cent of votes counted, the electoral authority announced Noboa as the victor.
Moments earlier, socialist rival Luisa Gonzalez conceded defeat and offered her ‘profound congratulations’ to Noboa, ‘because this is democracy.’
Addressing supporters in Quito, Gonzales also said she would not be claiming fraud.
Africa Today News, New York reports that Ecuadorans voted for 10 hours Sunday with no reports of violence in a country gripped by a bloody drug war and a rash of political assassinations that cut short the bid of a popular candidate.
Some 100,000 police and soldiers were deployed to keep the vote safe, while Noboa and Gonzalez both cast their votes in bulletproof vests just weeks after a rival was murdered.
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Both candidates had vowed to prioritize the escalating violence.
‘May we elect the best president because (he or she) will govern a country that is destroyed… to address all these problems such as insecurity,’ Indigenous voter Ramiro Duchitanga told reporters.
‘It is a critical election,’ added Freddy Escobar, a popular 49-year-old singer, citing crime as his main worry. ‘I am voting in fear, not knowing what will happen.’
According to recent polls, crime and violence are Ecuadorians’ top worries in a nation where the murder rate doubled in the four years leading up to 2022.
Long a haven of quiet between major cocaine exporters Colombia and Peru, violence in Ecuador has recently exploded as rival gangs with ties to the Mexican and Colombian cartels compete for power.
Since February 2021, there have been at least 460 prison massacres, with many prisoners being beheaded or set afire in large-scale rioting.
As a show of force, gangs are blowing up vehicle bombs outside police stations and hanging headless corpses from city bridges as the bloodshed spills into the streets.
In August, the violence claimed the life of anti-graft and anti-cartel journalist and presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, mowed down in a barrage of submachine-gun fire after a campaign speech.
He had been polling in second place.
A state of emergency was declared after Villavicencio’s assassination, and Noboa and Gonzalez both campaigned, and voted, with heavy security details.