2023-07-19 01:08:02
QUITO (AP) — The candidate for president of Ecuador Yaku Pérez, an environmentalist and indigenous person, ends up agitated following dancing to the Andean tunes of an indigenous band that was at the presentation of his government plan in Quito, the country’s capital. His proposal, in case he comes to power in the August 20 elections, is to implement a transition government that will take the nation out of the chaos inherited from the recent presidents.
Wearing an impeccable light blue shirt, blue pants and brown shoes, as soon as he sits in front of the cameras, he apologizes, takes off his shoes and throws them aside with disdain. “They will never force me to wear these things once more, my sandals are better,” she justifies.
For Pérez, the early elections from which the replacement of the Ecuadorian president, Guillermo Lasso, will come out, represent his second attempt to govern a country taken by insecurity and in an economic situation squeezed by unemployment and the lack of public investment.
He asserted in statements to The Associated Press that he will enter the most violent neighborhoods with well-equipped police and military personnel, but he also offered “education, health, productive loans for young people and housewives” in those sectors to reactivate their economy.
His goal, he announced, is to create 500,000 new jobs in almost a year and a half of government – which is how long the mandate will last when it comes to early elections – through State investment in the rehabilitation of road, educational, and health public works. “We are going to turn our eyes to the countryside, the greatest wealth is not in oil or mining, it is in agriculture, in tourism,” he stressed.
It was precisely before Lasso when in 2021 he was regarding to go to the second round and leave the current president out of the electoral contest. But 0.36% of the votes ended up tipping the balance of votes in favor of the current president. Pérez was left out of the ballot with 19.38% of popular support.
As in that call, Yaku Pérez appears with one more citizen. It is usual to see him wearing jeans, a white shirt, sandals and riding a bamboo bicycle. He also stays in the houses of his supporters and eats in markets and squares, without posing, along with the rest of the Ecuadorians who come before his presence. He often animates his performances by playing Ecuadorian melodies on his saxophone.
“You don’t need to be a prophet to know the support we saw coming,” Pérez told the AP at the time of specifying that the proposal with which he ran for the presidency two years ago “is now just cooling off”, remembering it, among the citizens .
Of his future government, he stressed that he will “lay the foundations for a firm institutional policy, but with the other hand extended with social inclusion policies.” To do this, he said he was willing to dialogue and reach agreements with all the political blocs represented in the Assembly, knowing that the main stumbling block in the Lasso government was the recurring legislative blockade where the ruling party was a minority.
The elections on August 20 are a reflection of the unsuccessful understanding between the executive and legislative branches. The Ecuadorian president dissolved the Assembly in May and shortened his own term in office by activating the figure of the cross death in the midst of a political crisis and an attempt to remove him from office. Consequently, 13.45 million Ecuadorians will go to the polls once more to elect president, vice president and 137 assembly members.
According to voting intention polls, Pérez ranks third among the candidates behind Luisa González, a candidate for the leftist Revolución Ciudadana party backed by former president Rafael Correa, and Otto Sonnenholzner, a former vice president in the government of Lenín Moreno who now runs under the Actuemos alliance, made up of centrist parties.
In his previous campaign, he showed himself to be a tough opponent of large-scale mining, but in this campaign he clarifies the situation by stating that “with those contracts that have complied with the State’s requirements, we will be respectful of legal certainty.”
Two large industrial mines operate in Ecuador, mainly gold and copper, in the open pit, while they multiply throughout the country, especially in the Amazon, along large rivers, illegal mining exploitations noted for razing forests and mountains with heavy machinery and for contaminating those areas with heavy metals.
Pérez pointed out that he will be a firm opponent of mining that pollutes, predatory, “that is in water sources.” He anticipated that he will propose “a reform to the constitution so that the water sources are free from mining, and if there is a blockade in the Assembly we will go to a popular consultation.”
Asked regarding the economic resources necessary to carry out his administration, Pérez affirmed that they will come from the State budget, from the imminent renegotiation of cell phone contracts between private companies and the State, and from the international monetary reserve of the Central Bank of Ecuador. , of which he said he will take “a small part, 10%” to face the crisis that the country is experiencing.
He assured that he will not give public positions to the rest of the candidates in exchange for governance, but that he is willing to collect their proposals to improve his possible future administration. He also ruled out participating as a member of another government if he is not elected as president.
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