‘Ecuador’s Bukele’ Is His Own Man
Amid narco-crime and economic turmoil, how did Daniel Noboa, an American-born, 37-year-old outsider, raise the hopes of a nation?
Facing a packed room at the capital Quito’s Hilton Colón, where Ecuador’s electoral body (CNE) has set up a bustling command center, twenty special forces—balaclava-clad and armed to the teeth—flank a table of five empty seats where results will soon be certified. It’s past 8 p.m. on election night, amid a militarized, state-of-emergency presidential run-off, and polls closed three hours ago. To the surprise of regional observers, left-populist runner-up Luisa González just said she won’t assent to Daniel Noboa’s re-election, which by this point has become all but assured. With 80 percent of nearly 14 million votes counted, ubiquitous screens beam the incumbent’s lead in all but five of the country’s 24 provinces, surpassing the million-vote mark nationally and reaching an impressive 12-point lead.
The CNE head’s rubber-stamping address concluded, she joins a suffocating gaggle down the atrium. The security detail tracks her every step as she urges reporters and observers alike to disown “Luisa’s” denialist antics. They seamlessly adjust formations around their asset, scoping out exits at every turn.
Armbands and patches mark the intimidating members of this elite commando as Amazon counterinsurgents, rangers in an indigenous-soldiers unit, veterans of urban combat, or officers trained in “Krav Maga” self-defense tactics. This war readiness is an unmistakable deterrent. Under the threat of endless narco-crime, the Ecuadorean state stands armed, too—and ready to defend the nation, and the election results, at rifle point.
Noboa triumphed on Palm Sunday, and profane analogies to the gospels would befit a less devout nation than Ecuador. Tight polling had tensed the race, viewed as “round four” of a multi-stage face-off against González that began nearly two years ago. In early February this year, Noboa’s first-round lead was a photo-finish 0.17 points. Even his run-off margin of 3.66 percent against González in November 2023, historically large at the time, stands now trebled. Still, despite his rising popularity and the state forces available to him, Noboa has been chided for lacking a long-term governing vision amidst Ecuador’s travails with drug-related violence.
The country was long an outlier of safety and quiet in an otherwise perilous region. Yet by the time Noboa took the reins, Ecuador had become Latin America’s most violent hotspot, spiraling downward in a state of failure that began under left-wing strongman Rafael Correa, who fled corruption charges in 2017, took asylum in Belgium, and was later sentenced in absentia for bribery. Amidst a global surge in cocaine production, transnational crime has found in Ecuador’s Pacific shores a convenient transit point for the white stuff. Homicide rates stood at nearly 50 per 100,000 when Noboa took over, with Mexican cartels, the Albanian mafia, and their Ecuadorean acolytes engulfing the coast. Emigration has spiked, sending Ecuadorean illegals across the U.S. border. Human capital has shrunk in a climate of fear.
The climate worsened in August 2023, when Colombian hitmen killed law-and-order candidate Fernando Villavicencio on the stump, propelling Noboa’s candidacy that year. Months later, after Noboa assumed office, hooded gunmen stormed a TV station and threatened to shoot the prime-time anchors point-blank. Around the same time, a high-security prison riot erupted after an assassin had broken free. Noboa declared an “internal armed conflict” against twenty-two “organized delinquent groups” (GDOs), not unlike the emergencies the region’s caudillos of yesteryear would proclaim, and that human rights discourse now depicts as obvious pretexts invoked to wage ruthless civil wars and amass power and privilege. The term “guerrilla” wouldn’t misrepresent the warfare tactics these delinquent groups often use. Dealing with them as domestic terror threats, as the state has done since a referendum last year beefed up the government’s extradition and penitentiary clout, is exactly what many Ecuadorians want.
Noboa is known as the scion to a business empire, but statesmanship runs in the family, too. His grandfather, Gustavo Noboa, was president in the early 2000s, and in the 1850s, a more distant ancestor led a liberal revolution. Yet the political ambition that seemed an inbred family trait went frustrated under his father Álvaro’s failed bids for the presidency. Daniel has had better luck in politics, and though he has won elections to the highest office, and despite his party ADN rebranding to center the man himself, his outsider aura from 2023 hadn’t waned in this year’s elections. Highways were strewn and windows adorned with cutouts of him, and transcending the “politics of old” was again a near-constant refrain. At Noboa’s poor debate performance three weeks ago, the shibboleth seemed to mask his lack of preparation and cocky underestimation of González.
Even against a left-populist opponent, Noboa’s form of bourgeois, personality politics apparently did not cost him undecided voters. Miami-born, with degrees from Harvard, Northwestern’s Kellogg School, New York University, and George Washington University, he rolled into his polling station on Sunday near his downtime estate, close to Guayaquil, with his blonde influencer wife and two cartoonishly polished kids in tow.
Noboa’s campaign team kept composure and wisely let the pettiness, ineptitude, and unpopularity of others do their work for them. González has been widely seen as wanting to roll out the red carpet for Correa’s return from exile through a last-ditch attempt to overturn the 2020 bribery ruling. She is also rumored to have a child with the former president, her mentor. The unproved theory was peddled during the campaign homestretch by Erik Prince of Blackwater, a U.S. military contractor whose defense deals with the Ecuadorean state were on the line in this election. Noboa’s ex-wife lashed out at the president to El País, the Spanish left-wing daily, but her interview seemed to fall on deaf ears. Portrayals of Noboa as a lawless, megalomaniac despot were amped up as well, to no apparent effect. Inviting Puerto Rican reggaeton star Tito el Bambino to his closing rally in Guayaquil, in contravention of culturally protectionist rules for campaign season, was doubtless a legal misstep, but largely viewed as harmless, even humorous. A damning profile of Noboa by John Lee Anderson of The New Yorker a few months back was effectively disowned by aides as a hit job, and similarly flopped beyond elite circles.
One reading of Noboa’s shock win is that his time in office, though disappointing to many, was too short for any perceived inadequacies to matter. His record on security was somewhat positive, but improvements are hardly noticeable to most Ecuadorians. Timid declines in homicides were offset by surging extortions and kidnappings. Ecuador’s legal quandaries have worsened, even as the global kerfuffle around the detention last year at Quito’s Mexican embassy of Jorge Glas, Correa’s former VP and corruption accomplice, seems to have subsided, pending an ICJ ruling. Noboa is increasingly portrayed as Bukele-on-the-Andes by progressive outlets and human rights lobbies, especially after a group of Afro-descending kids thought to be on the narco-pipeline were disappeared by an army squad at an anti-drug raid in Guayaquil. After welcoming with open arms refugees from nearby Venezuela, which González pounded him for, Noboa has pledged to swiftly deport the lawless ones. The proposal out-polls González’s idea of community-based watchmen patrols (gestores de la paz). Her ties to Venezuela’s left-wing president Nicolás Maduro remained a liability even after claiming that increasing deportations to Venezuela would require recognizing the strongman’s sham reelection from last summer. Her rival’s promise to do it without formal recognition is close to the legal truth, and was believed by most Ecuadoreans.
Noboa’s timid successes on the economy, where he trailed his adversary, similarly failed to register, and these days the perennial bugaboo of neoliberalism isn’t as salient a problem as it once was. His platform was often limited to opposing Luisa’s toying with de-dollarization, which Ecuadoreans correlate with the instability and inflation of the 1990s sucre. Ecuador is no longer on the verge of payroll default, as when Noboa first took office, but the fiscal situation remains worrying. Noboa weaved together a message of improving safety and prosperity, a correlation Ecuadoreans largely feel. He emphasized that organized crime, not individual bad apples, fuel the crime epidemic—and that he knows how to solve the problem. Yet short of an ambitious bargain with Washington—whose support for Ukraine and Israel he has condemned—Noboa’s security agenda may continue to lack cash for DEA-style, first-world operations.
Up until the sunny humidity of campaign season, Ecuador was hit by droughts. The mass blackouts its largely hydroelectric system produced dinted Noboa’s popularity, and his misplaced embrace of EU-style environmentalism offers room for improvement in his full-length term. His 2023 election was synced with plebiscites on mineral extraction where he tacked to zealot conservationism, leaving the open boulevard of extractive developmentalism to González. Ecuador’s fiscal straits and the rise in prominence of fracking and aggressive extraction should change that, especially since illegal mining has gone on anyway in some areas. The latter has fed corrupt politicians and endangered indigenous communities and biodiversity more than a responsible strategy of vetting, contracting, and observing international protocols ever would.
Another cloud hanging over Noboa’s campaign was the potential backlash to his war on drugs, which risks being seen as slow-moving, costly, and tyrannical. Reams of academic research have shown that military-grade, scorched-earth operations against cartels often prove ham-fisted and counter-productive. That literature recommends instead surgical jobs to take out the bloodiest assassins even at the cost of leaving small-scale urban traffickers in place. Several of Noboa’s advisors, though mostly confident that González’s overtures to a tacit, pacifying deal with the GDOs would prove self-defeating, worried that his 2023 voters would have second thoughts and come to question his depiction of the proposed conciliation as ushering in a “narco-state.” Those voters may yet turn against Noboa. Innocents are bound to die in the crossfire, and survivors likely to change their vote, when an all-out war is declared against the drug peddlers.
Of course, Ecuadoreans didn’t weigh these arguments in the same ways that academics do, since crime for them is not an abstraction but embedded in their daily lives. With their president’s mission far from complete, they are not for switching horses midstream, and they palpably trust the unrelenting and uncompromising character they sense in Noboa and no other Ecuadorian leader. The outsider president, furthermore, openly acknowledges the rot in the bowels of state and promises to drive it out.
Beyond Ecuador, Noboa remains unclassifiable. If his tough-on-crime aura earned him parallels with Bukele, the ample mandate he has now secured is already fodder for louder accusations of authoritarianism. Yet his election can’t be read in normal global terms, and labeling him “conservative” or “right-wing,” as much of the Spanish-speaking press does, isn’t right. Noboa is, if anything, a centrist and a pragmatist, and international observers should understand that his reputation and apparent ideology comes filtered through the abnormal prism of crime-related politics.
Noboa’s personalism and ideological ambiguity on major issues has been deliberate. His political strength lies in a palpable impatience with dogma and a preference for boldness and sovereign decision. Noboa was depicted in a recent New Yorker piece doggedly asking advisors for options on building a high-security prison… in Antarctica. Aside from an informal chat at his West Palm Beach estate in March, Noboa has not yet officially met with President Donald Trump, but has already touted goodwill from the U.S. leader. When the time comes, the mutual paeans traded in the Oval will have been written in advance.
Given Noboa’s untapped right-populist potential, some of his aides are working to squeeze him into the molds of disciplined partisanship, if not professional politicking. Yet a traditionally right-wing line is a risky bet, given the unpopularity of conservatism in the wake of his predecessor, Guillermo Lasso. But it’s not clear how long he can sustain his vagueness on social and moral matters, even if his crusade against crime proves successful. Neither of the races he has won was fought on culture battlelines, but hot-button culture-war issues can bubble up in Ecuadorian politics. Correa, for instance, officially put binary sex over gender identity and re-affirmed the sanctity of life, and he got credit for keeping closed the Pandora’s box of hyper-progressivism, but the moves also lowered the salience of culture issues in future elections. Noboa eschews ideology out of a deeply-held instinct, not a contingent calculus, but if a progressive challenger arises, he may have to pick up the banner of traditionalism—and risk alienating young voters who would otherwise favor his tough-on-crime approach.
Aligning with Trump and the global anti-woke wave would therefore bring political costs, at least potentially, so Noboa would rather keep the focus on security, meaning he has every incentive to crack down on crime. Senior voters thought to have swung the election in Noboa’s favor, meanwhile, are already sold on rightism.
Noboa, of course, needs to consider voters of all ages and ideologies as he navigates political challenges. Voting abstention is not really a choice in Ecuador, where casting a ballot is compulsory on penalty of $47 or losing access to public services. Noboa is not inclined to engineer bold ideological policies, and he seems for now to lack the organizational super-structure on which he could one day outsource the job. Rallying his people against the scourge of violence, meanwhile, seems a wise move. If he can pull it off, he’ll not only guarantee his continued electoral viability, but his status as a transformational figure.
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