Ecuador's president claims 'irregularities' in first-round vote

QUITO - Ecuador's President Daniel Noboa claimed Tuesday there had been "irregularities" in a first-round election in which he took a razor-thin lead, triggering a run-off.

The official outcome of Sunday's vote gave Noboa 44.15% of the votes cast, followed by 43.95% for leftist challenger Luisa Gonzalez - an outcome closer than predicted by opinion polls.

"There were many irregularities," Noboa, 37, told a domestic radio station Tuesday, insisting his campaign team's tally gave him a "higher figure" and that work to check the official count was continuing.

European Union election observers on the ground, however, said they had seen no evidence of fraud, and the Organization of American States (OAS) said its own initial count was in line with that of Ecuador's electoral council.

With 50% of votes required for a first-round victory, a runoff is set for 13 April.

Noboa, heir to a billion-dollar banana export business, campaigned on his crackdown on drug cartel violence blamed for a surge in murder, kidnapping and extortion in Ecuador in recent years.

In 2023, the once-peaceful country recorded a record 47 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, and after Noboa's first 14 months in office, the figure dropped to 38 per 100,000, according to official data.

Gonzalez, a 47-year-old lawyer, has called for greater respect for human rights in the war on the cartels, and said Sunday's result showed "that people want change."

The next president will also contend with massive state debt, worsened by the costly war on gangs, and a poverty rate of 28%.

'PEOPLE WERE THREATENED'

Noboa was elected in 2023 to complete the four-year term of predecessor Guillermo Lasso, who had called a snap vote to avoid impeachment for alleged embezzlement.

One of the world's youngest leaders, Noboa insisted Tuesday there were "dozens and dozens of cases in which people were threatened in order to vote for the Citizen Revolution" party of rival Gonzalez, who had also signalled voting "anomalies."

But Gabriel Mato, head of an EU observer mission in Ecuador, told reporters in Quito: "We do not have a single objective element to indicate that there had been any type of fraud."

And an OAS statement said it had "not identified or received any evidence of irregularities."

Gonzalez, in a post on X, urged Noboa to show "respect" and insisted her voters were "neither narcos nor criminals."

Noboa and Gonzalez had already duelled for the top job just 15 months ago, and the 2025 rematch is widely seen as a referendum on the president's hardline approach to law enforcement.

Since taking office, Noboa has declared a state of emergency, deployed the army to the streets and prisons, and amassed extraordinary executive powers to curb cartel violence.

Human rights groups say the aggressive use of the armed forces has led to abuses, including the murder of four boys whose charred bodies were recently found near an army base.

Both Noboa and Gonzalez were shadowed on the campaign trail by a phalanx of special forces, hoping to avoid a repeat of the 2023 election when a leading candidate was assassinated.

Sunday's vote passed off peacefully.

Ecuador is home to an estimated 20 criminal gangs employed in trafficking, kidnapping and extortion, sowing terror in a country of 17 million that is squeezed between the world's biggest cocaine producers, Peru and Colombia.

In recent years, the South American nation has been plunged into violence by the rapid spread of transnational cartels that use its ports to ship drugs to the United States and Europe.

Gonzalez is the protege of socialist ex-president Rafael Correa, who is living in exile and was sentenced in absentia by an Ecuadoran court to eight years in prison for corruption.

If she wins in April, Gonzalez would be Ecuador's first elected woman president.