Ecuadorians just delivered a decisive public rebuke to president Daniel Noboa. His latest referenda, pitched as a cure-all for the country’s spiraling security and economic crises, failed. That blow came despite Noboa’s well-cultivated climate of fear, militarization, and state pressure.
Noboa’s project has become increasingly authoritarian, hollowing out institutions, cracking down on civil society, empowering the security forces to do basically anything they want in the name of fighting a “war on gangs,” and deepening inequality to grotesque levels, under the banner of an almost Orwellian perversion of “freedom, security, democracy and prosperity.”
Almost two years ago, an armed group stormed a TV broadcast in Guayaquil, taking the crew hostage. Noboa seized the political opportunity, declaring an “internal armed conflict,” labeling 22 gangs as “terrorist organizations” and deploying the military to the streets under “states of exception” during an election.
All of this, of course, with complete disregard for Ecuador’s other four branches of government and democracy.
As predicted by many analysts, academics, and human rights groups, his “war on gangs” has been catastrophic. Despite two years of troop deployments, Ecuador’s homicide rate has continued surging, exceeding 50 per 100,000 in 2025 – the highest in Latin America. It was 5.84 per 100,000 in 2017. Forced disappearances, confirmed in dozens of cases by Amnesty International, have increased.
Children have been kidnapped by security forces, and at least four have turned up dead. Noboa’s pressure to show results has coincided with the security state regularly engaging in torture and having carte blanche to kill any supposed “narco-terrorist.”
Noboa has been a darling of Western states, particularly the Trump administration, which views the president as a proxy bulwark against drug cartels. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has already been to Ecuador twice, staging photo-ops and visiting potential sites for U.S. military bases.
Noboa, who was born in Miami, studied at George Washington University, and is a U.S. citizen, has been to the U.S. at least 13 times in 2 years. The modern Latin American right, embodied by Noboa and a wave of new, more “populist” leaders like Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei, is promoting an old, failed package of militarization, gutting social programs, and autocratization, popular in Western capitals.
The War on Drugs, as researchers have shown for decades across the Americas, does not solve complex security crises of the kind Ecuador is facing. Trying one for the millionth time since the 1960s, just with better guns (which the cartels also have, by the way), won’t change much. It can, however, be used as a cudgel to destroy democracy, the rule of law, and rights, and Noboa has materialized that scenario with extraordinary speed.
One expert who has been rightfully sounding the alarm is researcher Pedro Labayen Herrera at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), one of the few think tanks challenging Beltway thought on Latin America. Herrera, who has tracked Noboa’s authoritarian drift, points to a pattern of mounting attacks on Ecuador’s institutions and democracy.
As Herrera recounted in an interview, within two years, “Noboa has illegally removed his vice president, vilified judges, encouraged harassment, and incited bomb threats against the Constitutional Court.” Noboa has named critics, activists, and Indigenous leaders as “terrorists” and “destabilizers,” even deporting some of his critics.
He has pressured the Constitutional Court to grant him sweeping security powers and approve a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the 2008 constitution, considered one of the strongest rights-based constitutions in the world, including rights of nature, indigenous rights, and ironclad accountability mechanisms.
Herrera added that “Noboa has criminalized protests,” noting that the most recent demonstrations, sparked by the government’s removal of fuel subsidies and sweeping austerity measures, were met with brutal repression. According to CEPR, security forces killed 3 people, injured 473, and arrested 206 others, slapping many with terrorism charges while suspending basic civil liberties.
At the same time, Noboa is trying to expand intelligence powers to permit warrantless surveillance, the use of undercover identities, and virtually no institutional oversight.
Meanwhile, the young autocrat’s second set of referenda sought the return of foreign military bases on Ecuadorian soil, attempting to reverse the ban put in place in 2008 when Ecuador expelled the U.S. from Manta. He has also allowed the DHS and U.S. military access to the Galápagos, laying the groundwork for future bases that would destroy a fragile diverse ecosystem.
The CEPR researcher shared that the U.S. bases “have had disastrous health, environmental, and economic consequences for local communities, whose pleas have been ignored by the Noboa administration.”
Herrera retold, “Noboa has used repeated declarations of an ongoing ‘internal armed conflict’ to implement a more militarized security state and cozy up to the U.S. security apparatus, and to bypass judicial review, independent bodies, and rule by himself.”
Noboa’s corruption has also been out in the open. He and his family have assets in tax havens, and he has passed a law that allowed much of the tax owed by his family’s conglomerate to be wiped out. He wants a Free Trade Agreement with Canada that contains numerous direct conflicts of interest. Noboa is heir to a giant banana fortune—there has been documented evidence of his company’s banana shipments linked to drug trafficking.
Noboa has also allegedly used the Prosecutor’s Office for his own political gains, including to overthrow his Vice President without congressional approval (completely illegal). He also campaigned for re-election while president, which is also illegal. Perhaps worst of all, evidence points to Noboa realigning various electoral offices with loyalists, including the National Electoral Council (CNE), to ensure his victory in the 2025 election.
All this points to Noboa using the presidency and Ecuador’s institutions for personal gain. Yet Washington embraces him.
Noboa’s militarization has occurred in tandem with neoliberalization. Since taking office, Noboa has accelerated budget cuts tied to the IMF, closing six ministries and secretariats, removing fuel subsidies, dismissing thousands of public servants, and hollowing out social programs, creating immense social turmoil.
As Herrera argued, “these positions of militarization and economic liberalization are simply the default positions in the kind of conservative elite circles that Noboa grew up in. He campaigned as an outsider, but he is definitely representative of the same corrupt, elitist old guard Lasso was a part of.” Lasso, like Noboa, faced allegations of immense corruption and repression.
Almost absent from mainstream media coverage about the referenda is that Noboa wanted to slash public funds for political parties and elections, which would benefit wealthy machines like the Noboa family’s, and make grassroots challengers less likely to win – this is straight out of Orbán and Erdogan’s playbooks.
It would also open the door to foreign political financing, like, say, from the U.S. right-wing and mining sectors, while smaller political parties may also be forced to turn to organized crime to survive financially.
Noboa’s referenda were simply a canary in the coal mine, a signal to some of the U.S.-fuelled autocratization to come. His attacks on institutions, norms, democracy, and the poor will continue, while being sold as necessary, “serious” measures against gangs. Herrera does not despair, saying that “supporters of democracy, human rights, and strong institutions should oppose this, and mobilize, to build a different future for Ecuador.”
It remains to be seen whether these attacks can be stopped, and if the voters’ rebuke is a sign of a broader rejection of his agenda. So far, voters have shown that Noboa’s political wars will not be used to surrender their rights and basic national sovereignty.
Joseph Bouchard is a PhD student, journalist, and researcher from Québec covering security and geopolitics in Latin America. His articles have appeared in Reason, The Diplomat, The National Interest, and Le Devoir, among others.
