Twelve ministers, twelve ministers and a vice president missing in political combat. The first official photo of Daniel Noboa’s government did not disappoint almost anyone, with similar doses of hope and controversy: parity, youth and diversity on the one hand and the absence of the vice president, Verónica Abad, on the other.
The president, with his sash on his chest, surrounded himself with his ministers for a year and a half of express policy under the siege of drug trafficking and the economic crisis. The time is so short that the moderate leader has decided to cut short the first crisis of magnitude unleashed in the Palace. Abad, politically exiled, did not even go to Carondelet for the historic photo.
In the distribution of spaces, with cards glued to the floor where each one had to stand, there was no space for the “collaborator for peace” in the conflict in Israel, reduced in her functions after the restructuring of the vice presidency and “sent to Tel- Aviv.”
A day before, Abad took advantage of the celebration of the day to eradicate violence against women to defend herself through a melodramatic video that she uploaded to her social networks: “There is violence when, abusing power, they minimize you and send you to die in war. They can move away but the echo of our voice will free us”.
Businesswoman, social activist and former candidate for mayor of Cuenca, Abad landed in the Noboa candidacy after forcing the National Electoral Council (CNE) to achieve parity in the presidential ticket, as well as to achieve the coast-mountain balance essential in Ecuadorian politics. . From the first minute she showed her own agenda that foreshadowed problems in the future, although not of this magnitude. The crisis worsened when Abad forced two political meetings, the first with Santiago Abascal, leader of VOX, and the second with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele during the Miss Universe celebration. Noboa, who calls himself a “moderate social democrat”, has opted for a centrist politics far from the radical and populist poles that dominate politics in Latin America today.
Two drops that overflowed the camel’s back and led the election winner to slip in a speech, a few meters from his vice president, that “the path to the top also has betrayals, many times from people one does not even expect, people who “You choose. But that’s life, that’s human nature.”
To further confuse the situation, Ariana Tanca wrote a devastating tweet hours before going from being a political scientist to Minister of Women and Human Rights in response to the vice president’s video: “Mambrú went to war,” she shot sarcastically.
“Keep her in office with her own agenda, outside of any strategy and letting her create fires that the presidency is then obliged to put out?” asked political analyst Pedro Donoso to agree with the president.
It is not the first time, far from it, that the president and vice president have undertaken political blows. Lenín Moreno, for example, also pointed out very early on Jorge Glas, stained by revolutionary corruption, who finally ended up in jail.
The controversy generated by Abad eclipsed the political reach of those who will accompany Noboa in such a national situation, who according to the president “have taken the responsibility of turning around a country that is seriously wounded. They assume the responsibility of risking their lives.”
The great political bet of the first cabinet, mostly made up of women and young people, is the lawyer and university professor Mónica Palencia, who was granted Ecuadorian nationality this week after 40 years in the country, so that she could assume the Ministry of Government (something similar to a prime minister), with the charge in addition to the Interior portfolio. “The criminal mentality has taken over many, both in the public sector and in the private sector and we are going to work towards that as well,” said the new minister regarding the organized crime that terrorizes her country.
Governance, almost impossible during the 300 days of conservative Guillermo Lasso’s mandate due to his own mistakes and harassment from the legislative opposition, and insecurity are the two enormous challenges that Palencia, known for its temperance, takes on.
The other super minister is Juan Carlos Vega, in charge of rehabilitating an economy haunted by default. This portfolio has been in question for weeks, after Noboa was forced to give up naming his first candidate, the young economist Sariha Moya, 35 years old, trained at the Carlos III University in Madrid. In his meetings in Washington with entities such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in search of a loan of 10,000 million dollars, they showed that they preferred more experience for the position.
Moya will be in charge of the National Planning Secretariat at the head of a large group of young and highly qualified women. Sade Fritschi, only 26 years old and a native of the Galapagos Islands, is the head of the Ministry of the Environment. Ecuadorian Greta Thunberg even had a project to protect elephants in Zimbabwe.
In a country where TikTok has been transcendental in the last two elections, a tiktoker like Giancarlo Loffredo, the new Minister of Defense, known for his self-defense tutorials and his own karate school, could not be missing. The influencer has become the major surprise of the new cabinet, being far from the profile that the circle closest to Noboa was betting on to fight against the “internal war”: in-depth knowledge of the Armed Forces and the Police, in addition as an expert in Intelligence, strategy and military tactics. Cautious in his first statements, Loffredo announced that urgent security decrees are coming.