Two days after the Ecuadorian presidential election, leftist economist and politician Diego Borja traveled by car to the Colombian border with his wife. They hoped to vacation in the neighboring country for the Catholic holy week of Semana Santa.
But there, Ecuadorian border agents confiscated his ID cards and detained him. They said Borja, whose party lost the country’s election on April 13 to hardline President Daniel Noboa, was trying to flee the country.
Borja, a former minister of economy and the vice presidential candidate for Ecuador’s left Citizen’s Revolution party, was eventually freed and allowed to continue, but he denounced his treatment at the border as retaliation for his political ties and his harsh critiques of the current government. Borja is one of 100 left opposition figures targeted for persecution on a government list that was leaked by the Ecuadorian news outlet La Posta three days after the vote.
La Posta tweeted that that the country’s immigration office had sent it to them and that they planned to “complicate or block their departure from the country at borders and airports, without a court order.”
The list was quickly shared on numerous social media accounts. That afternoon, Colombian President Gustavo Petro offered asylum to anyone on the list who could arrive to his country.
“This list has one clear goal: persecution,” Borja told Ecuador’s Radio Pichincha. “They don’t care about the laws.… They have created problems for these people without any right to do so.”
He and many observers say this is just the tip of the iceberg of the political attacks, amid the concerning police state that has already been rolled out under President Noboa, and which is expected to only intensify in the wake of his reelection.
“His reelection means an unprecedented accumulation of power for Noboa in Ecuador,” Vivian Idrovo, the director of the Alliance for Human Rights in Ecuador, told Truthout. “Right now, all the economic power, the political power, the military, the media, the National Assembly are all dominated by President Noboa and his family and business.”
And he is using it to roll out his agenda.
President Noboa
Noboa is the millionaire son of a banana tycoon. He’s an ally of President Donald Trump, and was one of three Latin American presidents invited to attend Trump’s inauguration, alongside El Salvador’s strongman Nayib Bukele and Argentina’s libertarian leader Javier Milei.
Two years ago, at the age of 35, Noboa became the youngest democratically elected president in the country’s history, when he was first voted into office in snap elections. Then and now, he ran on the promise of cracking down on crime, attacking narcotraffickers and ending the violence that has rattled the country. Ecuador has one of the highest homicide rates in Latin America.
Noboa has made good on his promise of wielding an iron fist. He’s tried to emulate El Salvador’s Bukele, who has locked up more than 70,000 suspected gang members over the last three years. Noboa has embraced Bukele’s policies of sidestepping rights and due process to implement his security state. He’s also moved to build new maximum-security prisons, like the infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo constructed in El Salvador and now used to detain individuals deported from the United States.
“Right now, all the economic power, the political power, the military, the media, the National Assembly are all dominated by President Noboa and his family and business.”
Less than two months into his first term, in January 2024, Noboa made the unprecedented announcement that there was an “internal armed conflict” in the country. He declared a 60-day state of emergency, suspending some constitutional rights under the pretense of cracking down on drugs, gangs and narcotraffickers. The states of emergency have continued. The ninth and latest came just the day before April’s elections, permitting warrantless raids and outlawing gatherings in the capital city, Quito, and in seven provinces, all won by Noboa’s challenger in the first round.
On election day 2025, military soldiers, wearing camo outfits and carrying machine guns, were stationed outside every room holding a ballot box in the country. They flanked the table where the members of the National Electoral Council sat when they announced the results that evening, declaring Noboa the victor with 56 percent of the vote.
The Election: “A Fiction of Democracy”
Noboa defeated leftist challenger Luisa Gonzalez in the most recent election. She is the head of the Citizen’s Revolution, the heirs of the 10-year presidency of President Rafael Correa, who led Ecuador from 2007 through 2017 and oversaw a dramatic expansion in social spending, lifting at least 1.9 million people from poverty.
Gonzalez promised a return to the good days, turning the page on the violence by reinvesting in the country through education and health care and decreasing poverty and unemployment.
And she had the support of the country’s Indigenous political party. This was a big deal. The Indigenous movement had been at odds with Correa’s movement and the Citizen’s Revolution for nearly two decades over numerous policy differences, including extractivist policies on protected and Indigenous land.
But the month before the vote, Gonzalez and the country’s largest Indigenous political party, Pachakutik, met and signed a historic agreement. In it, Gonzalez agreed to 25 points, including respecting Indigenous community decisions over issues on their territory, taking action against illegal mining and moving to stop open-pit mining. She also promised to end oil extraction in the Yasuní National Park and mining in the Chocó Andino reserve. Ecuadorians voted for both of these in popular referendums in 2023, but nothing had been done since.
In the agreement, Pachakutik promised to support Gonzalez’s candidacy. The Indigenous party had received 5 percent of the votes in the first round. Their union would be an important boost for Gonzalez’s candidacy. She led most polls ahead of the election.
But when the results rolled in, they showed a 10-point win for Noboa.
Gonzalez told supporters in an impassioned speech on the street outside party headquarters that she refused to recognize them.
“This is the biggest fraud in the history of Ecuador,” she said. She demanded a recount, which the electoral council refused on April 24.
There is, as of yet, no concrete proof of fraud, but irregularities have been found in some ballots and experts have pointed out peculiarities in the electoral results. Regardless, analysts say, President Noboa carried out one of the dirtiest and unequal campaigns in memory — relying on fake news, vote buying and threats.
Noboa has embraced Bukele’s policies of sidestepping rights and due process to implement his security state. He’s also moved to build new maximum-security prisons
“We have witnessed the shadiest electoral campaign since the return of democracy in Ecuador, from the year 1979 onward,” said political analyst Decio Machado.
“These were absolutely unequal, opaque, fraudulent elections,” political sociologist Franklin Ramírez Gallegos told Truthout. “Noboa used all of his powers as president in the race, that is, public funds, bonuses, armed forces, trips, in addition to his immense fortune. This was a fiction of democracy.”
All of this was unprecedented. Just two weeks before the election, Noboa announced that he would be delivering roughly $560 million worth of bonuses, grants and cash transfers to hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians facing hard times. It was only the latest round of handouts by the president in 2025.
“It has been used for him to win in these elections. $560 million is like 10 times the 2024 budget of Ecuador’s Ministry of Energy and Mines. It’s crazy,” Francesca Emanuele, senior international policy associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Truthout. “Many of these cash transfers were sent to places that supported Luisa Gonzalez in the first round, and then she lost votes. I think that this played a huge factor in the elections.”
The political opposition, and poor and Black communities fear for the future.
State Violence
In the name of battling crime, Ecuadorian state security forces have committed abuses — and they are on the rise.
“We have seen a significant increase in cases of torture, extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances and overreaching the use of force, on the part of the state,” says Idrovo. “And it is causing fear in the poor, young, Black and marginalized sectors of the population.”
For good reason.
On December 8, 2024, four young Afro-Ecuadorian children, between the ages of 11 and 15, disappeared in the coastal city of Guayaquil after heading out to play soccer.
Surveillance footage reportedly showed at least two of the boys being carried away by soldiers in a pick-up truck. Their charred bodies were found weeks later near a military base in a neighboring town.
The case of the Malvinas — named after the neighborhood where the boys were last seen — sparked protests, concern and condemnation from human rights organizations.
It is not an isolated case.
“We have recorded another 33 detained and disappeared people, in the context of militarization, especially during the second half of last year,” Billy Navarrete, the executive director of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, told Truthout. “These cases were hidden. They’ve started to appear. They’ve started to become public … but there is a lot of fear to denounce this situation.”
Analysts say the roots of this shocking rise in state violence lie in the militarization of security in Ecuador, where there is a clearly stated “internal war” and widespread impunity for state crimes.
“Noboa’s ‘Internal War’ decree represented a moment that legitimized the strategy of militarizing public security,” Ramírez Gallegos told DW. “This strategy came hand in hand with a logic of criminalizing poverty and racial profiling, which associates skin color with dangerousness and criminality.”
Afro-Ecuadorians make up roughly 8 percent of the population. They live in higher populations along the coast, which has also been plagued by the bulk of the narco-violence and the country’s “war on gangs.”
“Noboa’s recent behavior indicates that he will launch another wave of persecution against the left and the opposition.”
More violence is likely on the way.
“There is no doubt what Noboa will do,” says Navarrete. “He will repeat the formula and continue in the line of the mano dura [iron fist] policies and the militarization.”
“Noboa’s reelection basically validates these actions,” independent Ecuador-based journalist Kim Brown told Truthout. She says it would not surprise her if Noboa increasingly used authoritarian tactics not just against the gangs, but against his political opponents.
The Opposition in the Crosshairs
In April 2024, Noboa officials ordered a violent raid on the Mexican embassy in Quito. They kidnapped Noboa’s adversary, former leftist Ecuadorian Vice President Jorge Glas. Mexico had granted Glas political asylum. Noboa’s police arrested Glas on corruption charges. Mexico broke off diplomatic relations over the raid. The act was condemned by countries across Latin America as a violation of the Vienna Convention and the embassy’s sovereign rights under international law.
“Noboa’s already shown that he won’t hesitate to take action against those who oppose him,” Brown told Truthout. “Activists who oppose mining projects in their communities have already been given prison sentences, and Cuban journalist Alondra Santiago was deported for writing mock lyrics to the national anthem criticizing his administration, even though she’s been a legal permanent resident here for over a decade. I suspect these kinds of reactions will only get worse.”
Many agree.
“Noboa’s recent behavior indicates that he will launch another wave of persecution against the left and the opposition,” Guillaume Long, the former head of several ministries under President Rafael Correa, told Truthout.
“I fear people will be targeted and harassed politically, judicially and in the media,” he said. “In the past, some opponents have even seen their families harassed and their homes under surveillance without court orders.”
Long’s name was included on the blacklist of opposition members circulated by the government. He says he didn’t personally have any issues leaving Ecuador and returning to his home abroad after the election, but said he believes the list was “circulated from the presidency to intimidate those of us who are normally outspoken.”
“Noboa has no fear or hesitation in violating human rights or any legal framework in the name of supposed national security,” sociologist Ramírez Gallegos told Truthout. “He is protected in this sense by the armed forces.”
Indigenous Communities: “We Will Resist”
Indigenous communities are also concerned. Noboa has backed extractive policies. On April 29, the head of Ecuador’s Mining Chamber of Commerce said she was hopeful that under Noboa’s second term the country could become “the next most important mining destination in the region.”
“We will resist this wave of a right-wing shift in Ecuadorian society,” Indigenous leader Leonidas Iza tweeted three days after the vote. “And we say it clearly: we will not back down.”
Of particular concern for Indigenous communities is Noboa’s promise to hold a constituent assembly to write a new constitution. The country’s current constitution was approved in 2008 and is considered one of the most progressive in the world, with recognition of Indigenous communities and territories and even the “rights of nature.”
In a press release, Ecuador’s Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador said Noboa’s new constitution would mean a “regression in the rights that have been won.… Rights such as the right to nature, collective rights, prior consultation, bilingual intercultural education, defense of territories and nature, among others.
“We need to build unity that does not respond solely to an electoral situation, but rather aims at a true process of transforming Ecuador,” Iza wrote.
Concern for the Future
Despite Noboa’s promises throughout the electoral campaign to continue the crackdown on gangs, the actual numbers show that his efforts to contain violence have been highly unsuccessful.
According to a recent investigation by Luis Cordova, the director of the Order, Conflict, and Violence program at the Central Ecuadorian University, homicide rates spiked in the first third of 2025 by 65 percent over the figures from the same period last year. The numbers put Ecuador on track to far surpass previous numbers of violent killings in the country.
“This is very significant. And it shows the uselessness or inefficiency of mobilizing the armed forces to combat crime,” said Idrovo. “What the military has served for is to implement extractive projects, or to suppress whatever attempt to protest the austerity measures or the serious crisis in the country. In other words, the mobilization of the armed forces has not fulfilled its objectives, but has become an effective form of social control.”
But Noboa has the support of the United States. The president traveled to meet for a photo-op with President Donald Trump just two weeks before the April 13 election. Last year, he signed two security cooperation agreements with the United States, opening the door for the U.S. military to operate in Ecuador. He has also promised to allow the U.S. to reestablish a military base in the Galapagos. In the lead-up to the vote, Noboa contracted Erik Prince, the founder of the U.S. private security firm Blackwater, to provide security for the elections. Prince paraded across the country praising Noboa.
“Next Sunday, the people of Ecuador can choose law and order, and choose Daniel Noboa,” Prince told the Spanish news agency EFE. “Or they can choose to make Ecuador look just like Venezuela.”
Analysts say this is all part of Noboa’s neoliberal vision for the country.
“Until recently they said that the political right lacked a national state project,” said Ramírez Gallegos. “It seems that this war is providing that structure for today’s elites. It means the continuity of neoliberalism, the continuity of the dominance of large oligarchic groups and the deepening of a logic of war and militarization to confront the problems of insecurity and violence. This despite the fact that this strategy has failed in all Latin American countries and has only left an enormous cost in human rights violations.”
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