For the second time in a row, a businessman and heir to a banana fortune has defeated the presidential candidate forged under the leadership of former president Rafael Correa. In the October 15 vote, overshadowed by Ecuador’s recent security crisis, center-right candidate Daniel Noboa won 51.8 percent of the vote to Luisa González’s 48.2 percent.

The surprising territorial distribution of the vote between 2021 and 2023 reveals many paradoxes. Noboa was a semi-unknown candidate, a green and young parliamentarian representing a discredited legislative branch. The reputation that preceded him was that of his father, the banana magnate Álvaro Noboa Pontón, who had unsuccessfully run five times as presidential candidate. Noboa was the great surprise of the first round of voting, an event shaken by the unthinkable murder of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio at the hands of Colombian hitmen on August 9, just days before the August 20 elections.

Something like this had not happened in Ecuador since presidential candidate Abdón Calderón Muñoz was assassinated in December of 1978. Calderón was killed under orders of the government minister of the military junta in power at the time.