 My name is Leonardo Flores. I'm a Latin America campaign coordinator with Cote Pink. Leo, can you just maybe give us a brief rundown of what happened yesterday, what you saw, and the outcome of the election? Sure, so there was a group of seven of us here doing electoral observation. We were deployed to, I think, in total maybe about 15 voter precincts, and really we didn't see any major irregularities. I would say the vote was carried out freely and fairly in terms of the voting itself and the vote count. And what we saw at the end of the day was a five-point victory for Guillermo Lasso, a right-wing neoliberal banker over Andrés Araus, a progressive candidate. And we also saw roughly 1.7 million people decide to either vote blank or to spoil their ballot. So I think that was an important factor in this election given that Lasso only won by about 400,000 votes. So what do you think were the biggest factors leading up to the election of Lasso and the defeat of Araus? Well, to me it's very clear that there was an uneven playing field here in Ecuador. I'll go into that in a bit. But also there were, you know, the CNE didn't play fair, especially before the first round of the elections. This was the second round of the elections. And what I mean when I say that the CNE didn't play fair is that, you know, you had Araus' political party was actually banned from running. It was the Allianz de País. And they tried to form a new political party and they refused that option. So eventually they found a small party that basically let them borrow the party as a vehicle for Andrés Araus to be able to run. On top of that you had a candidate banned. You had Rafael Correa, the former president. He was banned from running as vice president. And his image was banned from being used by the Araus' campaign. So, but not only that, they didn't actually ban his image from being used in a negative way by other campaigns. So it was very kind of one-sided. On top of that Andrés Araus was only able to register as a candidate in December. So you had other campaigns, had a four or five months' head start. And then you had the role of the media, which is very clearly, you know, corporate media dominates here in Ecuador. And they were very clearly in the Lasso camp. We had a dirty, dirty campaign on the part of Lasso spreading fake news everywhere. Initially one of the big things in terms of fake news was they claimed that Andrés Araus was going to de-dollarize the economy. Ecuador's economy has been dollarized for almost 20 years now, maybe a little over 20 years. And there's kind of widespread consensus that, you know, there are pros and cons to dollarization, and it's clear that dollarization has stabilized Ecuador's economy. And Andrés Araus knows this. He studies this, and he's an expert on this, and he never, ever suggests that he would de-dollarize. We also saw a campaign, electoral interference really from Colombia, when they, you know, they disseminated this video of supposed guerrillas from the ELN, the National Liberation Army, a guerrilla group that insurgent left this group and that's been operating in Colombia for decades now, in which they claim that the ELN had been financing the Araus campaign. This video was debunked immediately by an ornithologist of all people who noted that, you know, the video couldn't have been recorded in Colombia because it was a bird that was only on kind of the Ecuador, the southern border of Ecuador. So this was kind of false news, and yet, even yesterday, on election day, we had an important magazine in Colombia reviving these kind of absurd allegations. And so I think that played an important factor. People really started, I think common voters didn't really know what to think about Araus. They thought maybe he was corrupt in some way, but there's no absolutely no allegation of that. So I think a lot of that played into the fact that Tuomas is the feat. What kind of impact does the feat of Araus in the election of reviving neoliberal candidate like Lasso mean not only for Ecuador but also for the region? Sure. I'll start with the region. I mean, I think a victory by Araus would have really strengthened the region's attempts at regional integration during the so-called Pink Tide, which was this period in the early 2000s. You had when progressive government after progressive government took power in South America and Latin America as a whole and the Caribbean as well. You had these new institutions that were created, such as UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, and CELAC, the Community of Latin America and Korean States. These were meant to be sort of as a counterbalance to the OAS, the Organization of American States, which can really be understood as being a tool of the State Department to promote U.S. foreign policy throughout the region. UNASUR itself was actually a much broader project to end regional integration, kind of like the EU, and we were taking the first steps towards that. The Moreno government, the current president here in Ecuador, he withdrew Ecuador from both of these organizations, and that really dealt a big blow to the region as a whole. I actually heard a couple of days ago from a former ambassador who said that if UNASUR was as strong now as it had been five years ago, the pandemic would have hit South America not nearly as hard as it has because they would have been able to cooperate in terms of buying vaccines together, in terms of coordinating public policies and other things of that nature. Internally here in Ecuador, I think we're very worried for the people of Ecuador because the Moreno government, so Lenny Moreno was the candidate for the left in 2017. He was seen as the successor of Rafael Correa. Correa was in power for 10 years. He brought economic and political stability to a country that before he came in power had 10 presidents in seven years, excuse me, seven presidents in 10 years. And now what we're seeing is that Moreno basically betrayed the movement and he endorsed the policies that had been put forward by Lasso when he was the candidate in 2017. So really we can say confidence that Lasso, at least his political party, his vision has been in power already in Ecuador for four years and it's been a total disaster, especially in terms of the pandemic. Ecuador is one of the worst performing countries in protecting people from the pandemic. And economically there's a huge crisis. The Moreno government signed this really terrible deal with the IMF that really brings us back to the days of the Washington consensus in the 90s. It's all about posterity and deregulation and reducing the labor rights of workers. So I think there's a lot of concern as to what's going to happen here in Ecuador. The people of Ecuador themselves, there was an uprising in October 2019 against the elimination of a fuel subsidy that would have raised prices on everything, like everything from transportation to eating food. And there was a massive uprising by social movements put down violently by the Moreno government. Lasso endorsed that repression. And then I think that we're going to see more of the same over the next four years. So you talk a little bit about the lawfare tactics that were used against us and the citizens' revolutions campaign as a particular election. Sure, and that really goes back to the fact that Moreno betrayed the party in 2017. So early in 2017, right near the beginning of this mandate, it becomes clear to the Alianza Bayez party that Moreno was going in a totally different direction. One of the first people to blow the whistle on this was Jorge Glass, the vice president. Right after he blows the whistle, there's a huge campaign of political persecution of Jorge Glass. He's investigated for corruption. He's put in jail. He's still in jail, suffering greatly from what we've heard. And that was just really the beginning, the tip of the iceberg in terms of political persecution of Alianza Bayez, the Correa party, and their leaders. So we also had Rafael Correa basically have to go into exile in Belgium because here he would have been thrown into prison. And the campaign, you know, the case against him was ridiculously flimsy. At one point he was accused of having psychic influence over people, and that led to corruption. It's so ridiculously absurd. I mean, we shouldn't even have to address it, but unfortunately we do because the reality here on the ground is that anything is being used to hurt the leaders of Alianza Bayez, of what's known as the Citizens' Revolution. And that really ties into the election as well because you had all of these party leaders who were either in jail, under house arrest, in exile. And so you have this void of party leadership, meaning that your campaign is obviously going to be weaker than it could have been had everyone been here in the first place. And it's not just, you know, the fact that there's been lawfare in Ecuador. We also saw lawfare in Brazil, for example, take down two presidents, basically, Lula and Dilma. But here in Ecuador it took on a particularly nasty turn. So we actually spoke with Rafael Correa's lawyer Faustin, sorry, I'm blanking on his last name, but we spoke to his lawyer and he was telling us that despite the fact that he himself had COVID, he was forced to appear in the court system having COVID because the judges didn't want to give him an extension. So they actually brought his doctor up in front of the courts and they asked his doctor if he was able to speak. And that was the determining factor of whether or not this court case would go through. And people actually got sick as a result of him being there. And, you know, that's just one example. There are many others in court hearings being held at two in the morning. There was such political persecution that it has kind of really destroyed the party. And Andrés Arauza's campaign suffered as a result. And he just says what we might expect to manage in this administration in terms of the time spent. Yeah. And so, you know, there's a previous question that I asked, but I think it's kind of indicative of the law fair question. There is an expectation that there might be further persecutions on social movement leaders, possibly even people who were leaders in the 2019 uprising, but then also continued attacks on Correa's legacy and movement. Yeah. So the person's name is Faustin Harim. And he's not just Rafael Correa's lawyer, but he's actually now a member of the National Assembly. And it was curious. We had a very odd event happen to us as electoral observers on Friday. I guess that would have been April 9th. We had a meeting with, you know, a representative from the UNESCO Party. And after this meeting, we left the building and we happened to bump into Faustin Harim on the street and we were talking to him briefly just saying hello. And suddenly you had four cops on two motorcycles swarm us and very kind of aggressively opened our faces and asked for our IDs, asked for our papers and basically asked us to open our backpacks. You know, in the long run, it was nothing. But what the Ecuadorian witnesses told us was that that's like a very tiny taste of the persecution they've been facing over the past four years. And it's very clear to me that that sort of persecution, the incoming Lasso administration is going to try to do the same thing. It's not clear if there will be able to get away with it because the left actually continues to have a majority in the National Assembly. Andres Arauz's party has a plurality. The second biggest party is Pachakutik, which also has left tendencies. So I think there's going to be room for the left to fight back against this political persecution. But there is a lot of fear that people related to the Arauz campaign are going to come under heavy, you know, pressure. And especially and not just obviously the politicians but the social leaders as well. So we have Jaime Vargas, who's the president of Conai, the National Confederation of Indigenous Ecuadorians. And he, you know, he was a huge leader in the October 2019 uprising. And he actually came out in favor of Andres Arauz maybe about a week and a half before the election. And now there's a serious concern that Lasso is going to punish him and go after him. And, you know, one of the things that concerns me is living in the United States is, you know, we have the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issue this resolution in late March, basically touting the relationship between Ecuador and the United States. And not only that, but saying that Lenin Moreno had somehow restored democracy in the country when really Moreno did the exact opposite. He destroyed the country's institutions. He's the one responsible for the beginning of this political persecution. And the fact that Moreno and Lasso are so tied, what it says to me is that Lasso is going to have basically a green light to do whatever he wants here in Ecuador. And he's not going to face any sort of repercussions from the United States. You know, now, since we don't have multilateral organizations like UNASURD and Salaca Strong, we're going to have to depend on institutions within the OAS system, like the Inter-American Court for Human Rights, to defend the people who are going to be persecuted by the Lasso administration. And I'm not particularly confident that that's going to happen.