 For more videos on People's Juggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. On February 7th, over 13 million Ecuadorians took to the polls to vote for the next president of the country, as well as members of the National Assembly and Andean Parliament. While Andrés Arauz won the elections with an overwhelming victory of 32% and over 10 percentage points over the next runner-up, he did not win sufficient points to win in the first round. And thus, Ecuadorians will vote on April 11th to decide who will be the next president of the country. The small margin of difference between second and third-place candidates Guillermo Lasso and Jacopérez has led to these candidates to launch serious accusations of electoral fraud and to demand a recount of some of the votes. However, for progressive forces, the primary regularities in these elections have nothing to do with the close margin between neoliberal candidates Lasso and Pérez and have much more to do with the systematic attacks on the progressive ticket of Arauz and Carlos Rahuastán. Here to discuss the recent developments in Ecuador is David Abler, coordinator of the Progressive International and head of the Electoral Observation Mission of the organization that was on the ground in Ecuador for over a week observing the electoral process. Thank you so much for joining us, David. Pleasure to be here, Zoe. So, the last week in Ecuador has, of course, seen a kind of dramatic escalation in the situation following the elections. On Friday, a deal was reached between the National Electoral Council as well as the second and third-place candidates in the elections calling for a recount of votes across several provinces. So, as someone who observed the elections, as someone who's on the ground, you know, seeing different parts of this process, what can you say about these allegations of fraud and what else could be behind this call for a recount that also, we're going to add, was supported by the Organization of American States and the U.S. Embassy has also come out in support of this decision. Yeah, and so in that context of a broader regional backlash against popular sovereignty in Latin America, this is all too predictable what's happening in Ecuador. And many of the concerns that we were expressing weeks ago about the prospects of legal warfare being waged against Andrés Arauz, the front-running candidates, are now coming to fruition, which is, of course, a sign of the kind of desperation of the reactionary forces in Ecuador that they're trying to basically pull every trick out of the book, many of which we'll discuss here, but it really was to be expected. It's no less tragic in that sense, though. So, if we look at, you mentioned this deal that has been reached between two candidates, the second and third-place candidates, Guillermo Lasso and Jacopérez, with the National Electoral Council of Ecuador. This is completely unprecedented and completely illegal. I mean, you know, it stretches the imagination to think under which legal basis you could exclude the front-running candidate from a really important negotiation about an electoral recount, especially in the context in which that third-place candidate, Jacopérez, in front of the Electoral Council and a whole gang of media outlets was saying we now must form a bloc to defeat Correísmo, which is to say, to defeat the front-running candidate, and accusing, making vast accusations of fraud. And you asked whether we, as the Progressive International, have seen evidence of that. Now, I'm not going to say the level of the urna, the level of individual actas or individual votes, there wasn't some tempering. We saw a great deal, many irregularities, that raised some concern that we have communicated in a formal, transparent process with the National Electoral Council. But we've seen no evidence of large-scale fraud, and these accusations of fraud are so dangerous. You know, what we've been warning since the beginning is less a single act like a coup d'etat, and more death by a thousand cuts, that the democratic process in Ecuador was under so much strain from these accusations of fraud, from minor electoral missteps, and a range of other things that I'm sure we'll get into in the discussion, that the real danger was a cloud of uncertainty would hang over these elections and threaten the legitimacy of Andres Arauz's candidacy, and that's exactly what's coming here to pass. You know, just to give the listeners just a bit more sense of the ridiculousness of this. I mean, the absurdity of this procedure. We're not going to have a recount of 100% of the votes in Huayas, where Yacu Pérez came in really third place, but we're going to have a recount of 50% of the votes in 15 other provinces. I mean, which 50%, how 50%, under which conditions does a 50 partial percent recount even make any sense? The whole thing really does strain the imagination. And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see the ways in which the electoral process is fracturing under the weight of these various multi-party attempts to undermine legitimacy and the prospects for Narao's presidency. So getting back to something that you mentioned before, the PI has been accompanying the situation in Ecuador for the past several months. You've been raising concerns about the process, not so much about the voting process and the actual technical part on the day of February 7th, but leading up to the elections, there have been several irregularities, such as the almost disqualification of Andres Arauz as a candidacy, you know, multiple attempts by different courts and different candidates to disqualify him and the ticket, as well as you guys have raised several concerns about the quick count, which is something you referenced also about Bolivia that also considered, that created this situation of uncertainty. So can you talk about some of these concerns about the electoral process? How were they responded to? And how are they impacting the situation that we're in right now? There's no word to describe the situation other than a total shit show. And that shit show didn't start last week during the week of the elections, and it certainly didn't end last week in the week of the elections. It's critical to place the situation Ecuador in a medium or long-term context, because of course democracy is not simply the active voting, it's how the balance are created, it's about who can run, how they run, with what resources, with what publicity, how the media operates in that environment. Indeed, how the International Monetary Fund plays a role in supporting or undermining democratic institutions there in Ecuador, right? So we as electoral observers take that broad view of the Largo Plaza to say what are the conditions under which Ecuadorians are going to vote, right? They have this precious and incredible constitutional right to popular sovereignty. How is that being exercised? And once again, if you read it forward rather than backwards from the election, you just see how the ways, the ways this rich tradition of legal warfare, which of course was mobilized against someone like Rafael Correa, the ex-president who now lives in exile. But then through the course, this election was weaponized against its party, who were thrown off the ballot, so Andres had, you know, he couldn't show up, just to give you one example, a classic example now, sort of canonical in Ecuador. Correa was planning to come back and run as vice president on this ticket. But they changed the rules, so you had to show a signature, right? You had to show a physical signature. But because of the pandemic, they, you know, it was reasonable that you could just send it an electronic signature. But for some reason, Correa still couldn't send an electronic signature, so he was somehow disqualified. It's just a constant bending and rewriting of the rules to exclude the prospect of a progressive politics returning to Ecuador. And the stakes couldn't be higher. Ecuador has been hit harder than almost any country in the world by the COVID-19 pandemic, not just only in terms of health, but also in terms of its economy. And so at this critical juncture of, you know, historic crisis for Ecuador, you're either going to see the rebirth of a certain progressive politics for Ecuador, that could be equal socialists learning some of the lessons from a past coreismo, or a doubling down on, for lack of a better word, a neoliberal model that has destroyed millions of people's lives in the country and plans to extract millions more in upper-reistribution to the rich and to their offshore bank accounts. So everyone knows the stakes of these elections and they're pulling every dirty trick they have in the book. I mean, we could spend all day going through this sort of long telenovela of ridiculous tricks and mud slinging that has been there, but the critical thing is this, that Andres Arauz and his candidacy and the prospect of a progressive bloc that reaches beyond Arauz and includes the indigenous movement represented by the Conaia, the formation of progressive bloc really is a dangerous threat, not only to Ecuador and the reactionary right wing forces of Ecuador, but to the region, to the prospects for the integration of Latin America in a new UNASUR, to the formation of a deep tie between the mass, for example, that some come back to power in Bolivia and other left forces in the region. So that's why we see this election as such a critical one because it holds in it the seed for a new progressive wave of politics in Latin America indeed around the world. So far, we've kind of discussed some of the more official court-based legal maneuvers that have been used against the Arauz candidacy. We also know that there have been a series of slanders, campaigns launched against Andres Arauz in the Union for hope. One of these specifically was an accusation which implicated the Progressive International saying that somehow Arauz had received funds from Colombian guerrilla group ELN and we saw this weekend that Colombian prosecutor Francisco Barbosa actually traveled to Ecuador and held a meeting with Ecuadorian authorities to discuss this case. So what has been the response of PI to this? What are your thoughts on this and what kind of is behind this? We've moved from laughter to tears. You will never find... This is such a postmodern political situation. Truth is completely meaningless. You're just seeing lobs of lies against the wall and seeing what sticks. This is a rumor that is so thoroughly debunked by everyone from ornithologists looking at the sounds of the birds in videos of the guerrillas in Colombia to linguists looking at the speech patterns of who's speaking in these videos which are supposedly showing ELN guerrillas talking about comrade under the setups. It's ridiculous. It's absurd. But the problem is it's gone from circulating in the rag mags of Colombia to the high diplomatic pyrotechnics of Latin American politics. So you'll never find such a ridiculous combination of low degraded gossip without any base in factor law to the kind of the fiscalia arriving with tanks and flags and signing signatures. And that's just where we are in this campaign that they're so desperate that they're trying to pull out every stop that they have. But I think it speaks to the international stakes of selection as well, which of course is what motivates so much of the work that we're doing in terms of electoral observation and trying to show up and be present and be solidaristic. The Colombian right as well knows what it means for the left to come back to power in Ecuador and are terrified of it. So, you know, we're witnessing just a circus display of pulling out every stop they can. And the circus, I don't mean to describe it as if it were toothless or incapable of inflicting real damage on the Arauz campaign. There's a reason why we've been on the offensive, moving from laughter to really trying to take this as seriously it deserves to debunk it so thoroughly because it continues to swirl around in dominant channels in Ecuadorian media, in dominant channels of Colombian media. And, you know, this rumor will not be dispelled until it's been disproven, but apparently it won't be even dispelled then. So, you know, we've got a real challenge of our hands of misinformation. But I think it's critical to mention that that misinformation campaign is not just coming from these gossip rags in corporate media. It's coming from electoral authorities themselves. You know, when we were there in Ecuador, the electoral authorities had sent out mass SMSs to people all over the country saying, you have to vote by hour of the day depending on the final digit in your ID number card. Remember that voting in Ecuador is a constitutional right, but also a legal obligation. It's mandatory voting, right? So, they're telling people who tend to vote with their families, who tend to vote in the morning, who tend to make a ritual out of voting. They have to go by hour of the day, alienating and cracking away that kind of core unit of electoral expression in Ecuador. Total lie, no basis in law, nothing to do with checking IDs. It was a complete lie. So, there's so much disinformation floating around in the Ecuadorian demos that they're just trying everything they can to needle their way out of the situation, which of course is a broader reflection of the desperation of the law fair induced rights gripping onto the institutions of power in the face of mass and popular resistance to them. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And Ecuador is definitely a case we're going to have to be looking out for over the next couple of days to see how this unfolds, see what the response of Andrés Arauces, who has, you know, been excluded from some of these processes, see what happens with the recount. And of course, thank you so much for giving us your time and for all the amazing work that PI has been doing to support this process and be on the ground and observing what's been happening. Of course, and we'll be back in Ecuador for the second round as well. So, we'll be trying to keep close tabs, continuing with our electoral observation, continuing to relay what we're seeing on the ground there and hopefully we can speak again soon.