Ecuador's Noboa Can't Seem to Pick His Battles
James Bosworth
Aug 19, 2024August 19, 2024
Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa speaks during the Spain-Ecuador business meeting, in Madrid, Spain, Jan. 25, 2024 (Europa Press photo by Carlos Luján via AP Images).
Ecuadorian Vice President Veronica Abad filed a formal complaint with the country’s electoral court this month asking for the removal of President Daniel Noboa. Noboa, who is calling the move an attempted coup, is not likely to be removed. But this ugly fight between the country’s president and vice president is going to last for months to come and will shape Ecuador’s presidential election to be held next February.
The political dispute between Noboa and Abad is only the most recent dramatic turn in Noboa’s brief nine months in office. The two were elected as president and vice president in late 2023, after then-President Guillermo Lasso cut his own term short and called for snap elections. In January, a dramatic spike in already rampant gang violence led Noboa to declare a “state of internal conflict” with the organized crime groups operating in the country. In February, Noboa almost provided weapons to Ukraine until Russian President Vladimir Putin used a boycott of the country’s bananas to pressure him into reversing his policy. In April, Noboa set off a major diplomatic incident when he ordered Ecuadorian security forces to storm the Mexican Embassy to seize former Vice President Jorge Glas, who had sought asylum there to evade arrest and prosecution on corruption charges. Also in April, Noboa emerged with mixed results from a referendum he had called, winning on the security-focused questions but losing on two economic-focused questions, showing potential vulnerability that could resurface in his campaign to win a full term in office in February.
Throughout it all, Noboa and Abad have been at odds with each other. The two had a still unspecified dispute late in the 2023 election campaign and haven’t spoken since the second round of that ballot. After he became president, Noboa issued a decree naming Abad his “peace ambassador” to help mediate the Israel-Gaza conflict, sending her to Tel Aviv in what amounts to exile. She has not returned to Ecuador at all in 2024.
Then in March, Abad’s son, Francisco Sebastian Barreiro Abad, was detained on charges of corruption, with prosecutors accusing him of demanding a kickback for getting someone a job in the vice president’s office. They also say that Abad was involved in the scheme, but the National Assembly blocked the investigation while she is in office.
Abad claims that the corruption allegations and her banishment to Israel are all a plot by an authoritarian president to limit anyone who may try to check his power. She has accused Noboa and other government officials of violating Ecuador’s laws requiring gender parity in politics by effectively forcing her out of her position as vice president, as well as of political violence for stationing her in a war zone without protection. For those reasons, she says, Noboa should be removed from the presidency.
In response, Noboa says Abad is corrupt and that she has also entered into a secret pact with allies of former President Rafael Correa to undermine his presidency. But Noboa cannot remove Abad from office, so instead he has decreed that she can’t come back to Ecuador until she has successfully brought peace to Israel and Gaza, which is tantamount to permanent exile
More:
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/ecuador-politics-noboa-abad/?share=email&messages%5B0%5D=one-time-read-success
~ ~ ~
The "President", Daniel Noboa's father, Álvaro Noboa, was the richest man in Ecuador, King of Ecuador's bananas, who was a 5 time presidential election candidate loser before his little brain stem sonny boy, Daniel, became old enough to try it, himself.
Álvaro Noboa, wearing his sunny banana-colored shirt to remind you he is Ecuador's Banana King!
On the campaign trail in his father's banana republic, President Daniel Noboa.
Banana brain stem boy with his "blond bombshell" wife.
After being sworn in last year, sporting his bright banana yellow presidential sash.
His father's outstanding Wikipedia information, concerning the man's business practices:
Wikipedia:
- snip -
Labour practices
Usleap once affirmed Noboa has opposed campaigns for workers' rights within his own companies, and Noboa Group workers have been illegally dismissed for joining trade unions.[19][20] In one 2002 incident striking workers at a Noboa subsidiary were attacked and–according to a Human Rights Watch report–several were shot by organized assailants.[21][22]
In 2002 the New York Times reported on working conditions in Álvaro Noboa's banana plantations in Ecuador. The article specifically mentioned the 3,000-acre (12 km2) plantation known as Los Álamos that employed about 1,300 people.[23] The workers of Los Álamos unionized in March 2002. Noboa's company responded by firing more than 120 of them. The article read: "When the workers occupied part of the hacienda, guards armed with shotguns, some wearing hoods, arrived at 2 a.m. on May 16, according to workers, and fired on some who had refused to move from the entrance gate, wounding two."
Noboa's Company, on the other hand, claims that the conflict was illegally initiated since the number of workers' with which the special committees were assembled never reached the number required by law, that is, a majority. They tried to fool authorities by having participants who were not workers. Both the workers' committee and the strike declaration were illegal. It was said to the public and press that workers involved in this conflict were guilty of outrageous conduct at the farm, which motivated accusations brought forth before the authorities whereby the police had to intervene in order to safeguard company assets. The company told that conflict arose causing substantial losses due to unlawful stoppage of agricultural activity.[24]
Child labor
Noboa Group was also criticized in a HRW investigation into child labor practices in the banana industry.[25] In April 2002 Human Rights Watch released a report that "found that Ecuadorian children as young as eight work on banana plantations in hazardous conditions, while adult workers fear firing if they try to exercise their right to organize."[26]
Chiquita, Del Monte, Dole, Favorita and Noboa's company were all accused of being supplied by plantations on which children worked. Noboa's company claims that to be untrue since child labor in the agricultural sphere is part of the existing countryside culture which not only asked but demanded the performance of some type of agricultural labor from its siblings during vacations, in order to make ends meet, and to avoid vagrancy and therefore the possibility of delinquent behavior. It was pointed out that the work performed by these minors, and which fulfilled social and family-oriented needs, was always adequate for their age group and received all guarantees and conditions contemplated in social and labor legislation. It was said to the public: "Ever since abolishment of child- labor became a reality in agricultural concerns, Noboa Corporation took corrective measures to the extent that child- labor has been non-existent for many years not even for minors 15-18 years old which is permissible by law, due to consistent political attacks which distort the truth of the matter."[27]
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/ecuador-politics-noboa-abad/?one-time-read-code=319969172422731542553