Daniel Noboa, 36, the youngest president in Ecuador’s history, elected in the fall, vowed to “act with a firm hand” against criminal gangs to achieve “peace.” It has now gone so far that this billionaire son has declared that his country is “in a state of war” against drug traffickers.
The heir to the empire of banana king Alvaro Noboa is faced with the challenge of ending the stranglehold of numerous drug gangs in Ecuador, which was once a haven of peace but has become a point of departure for the supply of cocaine to the United States and Europe.
In office until the end of the theoretical term of resigned President Guillermo Lasso, who called early elections to avoid impeachment on corruption charges, Daniel Noboa is already planning his 2025 re-election bid.
But for that to happen, he knows he will have to deliver on crime reduction. He said yesterday that he had taken “the necessary measures that nobody wanted to take in recent years. And to do that you need balls the size of ostrich eggs”, he said.
From the state of emergency declared on Monday, giving the army the right to patrol the streets and prisons, to the “mobilization of the army and the police” called for on Tuesday to find a way out of the “internal armed conflict”, Daniel Noboa yesterday said that the country is “in a state of war”. “We are fighting for national peace, but we are also fighting against terrorist groups that already have more than 20,000 members,” he said.
To this end, he proposes “militarizing ports and borders and protecting strategic export and trade routes.” Its main project is the creation of a national intelligence agency to oversee all intelligence agencies, including the prison management service.
Last week, he announced that two high-security prisons would be built in the Amazon and on the Pacific coast, modeled after the 40,000-bed prison built by Salvadoran President Naib Bukele as part of his “war” on gangs.
President Noboa’s plan is to isolate the most dangerous prisoners in order to end the mass killings taking place in the country’s prisons, which have resulted in the deaths of 460 inmates since February 2021.
He provided a comprehensive list of criminal gangs he wanted to “neutralise”, but stressed the need for the armed forces to act “with respect for human rights”.
In El Salvador, human rights organizations condemn the violation of detainees’ rights.
And like Bukele, who is a skilled communicator and posts pictures of people behind bars on his social media, Noboa’s government has shared spectacular footage of recent police raids showing hundreds of detainees in their underwear, with their hands on their heads and stretched out mercilessly on the ground.
It is difficult to categorize the political affiliation of Daniel Noboa, who during the campaign claimed to be centre-left. But this neoliberal personifies the Ecuadorian political elite from the world of private enterprise and is close to the right.
Divorced and then remarried to a food influencer, this successful businessman studied at America’s top universities and holds a degree in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School and a master’s degree in management and political communication from George Washington University.
Apart from the business world, which he knows inside out, his only experience in politics is two years as a Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Parliament’s Economic Committee.
But his mentor is his father, with whom he grew up behind the scenes of election campaigns, and now looks to Naib Bukele for inspiration. (BTA)
2024-01-11 20:56:39
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