“French mercenary”, “Rambo”, “Ecuadorian Bukele”… the number of his nicknames is proportional to his atypical profile: Jan Topic, ex-French legionnaire and successful entrepreneur appears as one of the outsiders in the early presidential election August 20 in Ecuador.
A sturdy 40-year-old man, one meter eighty, bearded, tattooed and smiling, Mr. Topic has forged a relaxed image in the midst of a campaign almost already launched in which he repeats as a mantra that “Ecuador deserves to live without fear”.
A prosperous boss in the port city of Guayaquil, Jan Topic is among the eight declared candidates in the early ballot, in a country plunged into an institutional crisis and hit hard by the violence of drug trafficking.
The main declared candidates are for the moment the native Yaku Perez, Otto Sonnenholzner, the former vice-president of Lenin Moreno (2017-2021) or Luisa Gonzalez for the left, the only woman in the running and a supporter of the former -socialist president Rafael Correa (2007-2017).
According to the latest polls, he is a challenger. But the national press agrees that he is already “all the rage on social networks”, and that his speech of firmness against crime is hitting the mark.
Jan Topic has his groupies begging him for countless selfies and promising uncompromising action against organized crime, extortion, burgeoning kidnappings, and building more prisons.
His reference: Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, popular for having drastically reduced by expeditious methods the influence of the “maras”, these Central American criminal gangs.
“I have sympathy for Bukele”, but soon “we will call him the Topic of El Salvador”, he jokes during an interview with AFP on the terrace of the family business in Guayaquil, second city of the country and today the city most affected by crime and drug trafficking, where he has set up his campaign headquarters.
Of Croatian origin by his father and French by his mother, Jan Topic is a former paratrooper and sniper of the Foreign Legion of the French army. Five years in the prestigious 2eREP (Foreign Parachute Regiment), from 2006 to 2011. With deployments in the Central African Republic, Djibouti, and Ivory Coast in particular.
His official candidate biography also mentions, without further details, passages in 2012 during the “civil war in Syria”, and in 2022 for the “war in Ukraine”.
While studying economics and mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, in the United States, the attacks of September 11, 2001 which struck America in the heart are for him a call to “commit to war against terrorism”.
“I had the deep feeling of not playing my role,” he confesses. After graduation, he quit his job on Wall Street and joined the Foreign Legion.
However, he refuses to be called a “mercenary”. “It doesn’t fit. Because a mercenary goes into battle for money. I joined the Legion out of conviction,” he swears.
His guarding and security company, “Cajamarca”, founded in 2013, is now valued at at least $7 million, with clients including major football clubs and local subsidiaries of multinationals. His other company, Telconet (founded by his father in 1995), specializing in telecommunications, has more than 4,600 employees, with operations in three other Latin American countries.
“It is not a question of declaring war (on the mafias), the war has already begun”, affirms the one claiming to be the only candidate to have enough “courage and determination to act” and bring the criminal organizations to heel.
His muscular bicep bears a black tattoo in Arabic: “Death is afraid of him because he has the heart of a lion”, translates Jan Topic, explaining that it is a saying heard from the mouth of a soldier in Somalia. His skin is also marked with the flame of the Foreign Legion and a biblical symbol.
At first without a political party behind him, the candidate is now supported by the “Alliance for a country without fear”, made up of three parties, right, center and center-left.
This father of three defines himself as being on the right concerning the economy, the opening of markets, austerity, but on the left on social questions.
One of his projects is to provide free food in public schools so that children “do not become sicarios (killers) for gangs”.
After waging war for others, what did he learn? “The need to have plans for almost everything”, says the “Rambo de Sambo”, another of his nicknames because he lives in the luxurious area of ??Samborondón.
02/07/2023 16:09:24 – Guayaquil (Ecuador) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
