Ecuador: CNE Now Has Guillermo Lasso as Arauz's Runoff Opponent

The update of the vote recount in Ecuador changed the possible opponent of Andres Arauz in the second round of elections on April 11.

With just over 1,100 tally sheets (less than 3 percent) left to be accounted for in Ecuador's presidential elections, new data from the Andean country's National Electoral Council now place banker Guillermo Lasso as the candidate who would occupy second place in the polls and with the right to move on to the April 11 runoff.

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According to the latest figures, Lasso would go (as in 2017) to the second round, even though it appeared as irreversible the voting trend and the fact that Lasso passed Yaku Perez Wednesday night with 19.66 percent of the votes compared to 19.61 percent.

Furthermore, 1,000 of the 1,100 electoral records that remain to be computed are from the province of Guayas, where Perez has fewer votes.

The news of Lasso's entry to the electoral runoff had been anticipated by the calculations on the location of the tally sheets to be counted, strongholds for Andres Arauz, in the first place, followed by Lasso, which led to the denunciation of alleged fraud by the candidate for Pachakutik, Yaku Perez: "They are putting more votes to Lasso according to the original tally sheet, and to Yaku Perez, they are putting less, that is the fraud," he said from Guayaquil when the news of his defeat was disseminated.

The candidate of the electoral arm of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie) had already denounced fraud as pf Monday, a claim he has sustained since then: "The Confederation of Quichua peoples of Ecuador just sent me that yesterday they filed a criminal complaint, and now the assembly members are going to do it, a shame, but if this is left in impunity we are being accomplices or encouraging corruption," said Perez, surrounded by supporters.

Leonidas Iza, one of the foremost leaders of Conaie, made a statement on the matter: "We have been critical and self-critical in this process, we have ideological differences, but given the threat of the right-wing to attempt against the popular will, we will mobilize, and we will not allow the right-wing, wherever it comes from, to try to be above the popular decision," he said.

If Lasso's candidacy to the second round is confirmed, a scenario of confrontation between Arauz's progressive and Latin Americanist proposal, on the one hand, and the project of deepening neoliberalism and alignment with the United States, on the other hand, will take shape once again.