Cross death is a political outcome contemplated in the Constitution of Ecuador. In recent history we have had some ousted presidents, people in the streets, protests, tear gas, deaths, injuries, so that, in the end, Congress appeals to the falsely democratic formula and, with a minority of votes, replaces that president. To avoid such embarrassment, the constituents of Montecristi, a small city on the Ecuadorian coast, land of Eloy Alfaro, proposed that cross death could be invoked. The Assembly is dissolved, but general elections are immediately called, including that of president, which ultimately ends up picking up the cry that reveals the boredom of the people: let them all go!
Now Guillermo Lasso, banker, neoliberal, religious fanatic, from Opus Dei, will have from 3 to 6 months to prepare the way for his own abandonment of power, because the vote market did not reach him and with censorship and dismissal in his thighs , an embarrassment for whom the presidency was the icing on the cake who, like other rich people in the region, Piñera in Chile, for example, believed they deserved it for the mere fact of having accumulated an enormous material fortune. Fleeing forward, with death crossed, was the way out. Smug, vain, Creole daffodils.
Lasso tried three times to finally win, with a narrow margin, the 2021 elections. The campaign was carried out by appealing to images and shocking sayings, short phrases, rather, outlandish clothing, little red shoes. Behind such a campaign was a very well-known character in Argentina: Jaime Durán Barba.
They spent more than ten years showing a voracious appetite for the presidential house. Some believed that he had had enough time to prepare.
At the time of the ovens we find a slow character, without any knowledge of the public, or the public as if it were his bank, with employees who do not argue, who only obey orders. No ability to manage conflict; clumsy, breaking alliances, he was enough.
He gradually weakened, he appealed to lies, falsifying data, until the data from the different pollsters revealed that Lasso did not even have 10 percent popular support.
We come to February 2023 and he takes an electoral beating, people rejected his query, eight very crafty questions were all scorned. Lasso never made a seriously democratic act of recognition of his defeat that, in the end, resulted in a revocation of his mandate.
And, once again, the lies, the accusations, without any proof, that the opposition was financed by drug trafficking. Until a corruption scheme broke out in his face, with a very malicious handling of public affairs, with the sale of positions in key sites in very powerful companies in the Ecuadorian context, and with mafia operators who had, yes, a history of drug traffickers and who had been in jail, the most sinister of them one day was found dead with three companions, enough for Netflix to propose a series where the bullet, corruption, pimps abound. Many ministers resigned, other officials fled, and some have gone into hiding in Argentina as well.
Now Lasso is a political character who already smells of formaldehyde and will leave Ecuador in disarray. The good thing is that its failure is also that of neoliberalism, so that we already recognize, once and for all, as is the case in some parts of Europe, that humanity cannot choose the path of pure speculation, that politics cannot be so bloody, ruthless, indolent in the face of the tragedy of those who have nothing, that education should not fall into such great deterioration, that public health should not give us the funeral home as the only option. It is a great paradox that Latin America, the most unequal region on this planet, is still tempted by neoliberal demagogy. In Ecuador, this indolence is measured in thousands of lives: prison massacres, unleashed crime that leads us to the brutal rate of almost 40 murders per hundred thousand inhabitants.
Now we have to move to see if we can recompose the presence of a powerful State that puts the market in its place: a variable that cannot be left loose to dominate us and put capital above the human being. The question is exactly the other way around.
Elections must be called in 7 days; In ninety, candidates, men and women, must be presented to elect president and assembly members who must conclude the period that Lasso’s cynicism and incapacity made him have an abortion. Year and a half that should prepare us for 2025.
* Communicator, social scientist and former Vice Chancellor of Rafael Correa