On the eve of the presidential runoff, Ecuador again finds itself facing an election whose importance exceeds the usual differences between two candidates. The country arrives at the polls after years marked by insecurity, institutional weakening, corruption, and an increasingly worrying penetration of organized crime. In that context, it is tempting to reduce the discussion to a confrontation between left and right, correísmo and anticorreísmo, or continuity and change. I think, however, that there is a more important question: what kind of limits we are willing to demand of power, regardless of who exercises it.
Luisa González's candidacy inevitably has to be analyzed within the political tradition to which it belongs. Her closeness to Rafael Correa is not an association invented by her opponents, but an explicit part of her political identity. That also does not mean that a possible government of hers can be considered, in advance, an exact reproduction of Correa's government. It would be too simple to claim that. But it is equally naïve to evaluate her candidacy as if that decade had not existed, or as if the record of a political movement were irrelevant when that same movement again aspires to administer the state.
The problem is not only corruption
Correísmo governed Ecuador for a decade in which important transformations of the state, public investment, and economic growth coexisted with a progressive concentration of power and serious cases of corruption. Some of those cases long ago left the terrain of political accusation and ended in judicial proceedings and convictions. That distinction matters because a reasonable democracy should not confuse legitimate criticism with automatic guilt, but it also should not turn political memory into amnesia every time a new electoral campaign begins.
That is why my concern about a possible return of correísmo is not limited to the possibility that new cases of corruption will appear. Individual corruption can be investigated and, when sufficiently independent institutions exist, sanctioned. The deeper problem appears when the institutions charged with controlling power lose autonomy, because then the discussion stops being only who committed a crime and becomes who still retains the real capacity to investigate it. The independence of the judiciary, freedom of the press, administrative transparency, and the effective separation of powers can look like abstract matters during a campaign; they stop being abstract when the citizen needs the state to control itself as well.
Organized crime, politics, and institutions
The expansion of drug trafficking introduces an additional difficulty. Ecuador can no longer treat organized crime only as a police problem, because criminal organizations need money, information, protection, and access to institutions in order to expand their power. Precisely for that reason it is worth being rigorous: hinting at links between a political movement and drug trafficking requires concrete evidence, and an accusation of that gravity loses force when it is used simply as an extension of an ideological dispute.
My objection, then, would not be that a left-wing policy necessarily leads to permissiveness toward drug trafficking. That automatic relationship is hard to sustain. The relevant risk is another: any political project that weakens institutional checks, subordinates the judiciary, tolerates clientelist networks, or turns party loyalty into a criterion for administering the state creates conditions that can be used by criminal structures. This applies to the left and to the right. Drug trafficking has far less interest in the ideological coherence of a government than in its capacity to be corrupted.
Voting is also remembering
In these circumstances, talking about a conscious vote should not mean asking the citizen to vote from fear, but exactly the opposite. A mature democracy requires comparing proposals, teams, records, and institutional commitments without accepting that campaign propaganda replace the memory of what happened. Records do not inevitably determine the future, but they are part of the information with which we reasonably try to anticipate it.
Personally, I consider that the return of correísmo represents risks that should not be minimized. That conviction, however, seems more defensible to me when it is formulated from institutional criteria than when it depends on labels such as “communism,” “dictatorship,” or “narcopolitics.” If we want to criticize an authoritarian tendency, we should be able to point to which institutions were weakened, which mechanisms allowed the concentration of power, and why they could be repeated. Otherwise we run the risk of fighting political simplification by using another simplification in the opposite direction.
Ecuador needs to confront insecurity, corruption, and the fragility of its institutions at the same time, and probably no president can resolve problems of that magnitude during a single term. That is why the election matters, but it also matters not to attribute almost magical properties to it. Choosing correctly does not guarantee strong institutions; choosing without demanding them can weaken them even more.
When we vote, then, we are not only choosing between two names, nor are we definitively resolving the political conflict that has divided the country for years. We are also choosing which records we are willing to consider, which risks seem acceptable to us, and, above all, how much power we want to grant without sufficient checks to those who promise to use it in our name. In a democracy, reasonably distrusting power is not a form of cynicism. It is one of the conditions for that power to remain democratic.
