Luisa admits that she is “Kermit the Frog" and that she will recognize Maduro
Brief summary of the presidential debate in Ecuador
In a lackluster debate, without major proposals about their government programs, Luisa González made several mistakes:
She admitted that, if she wins, she will recognize the dictatorial government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. This is consistent with the fact that Correismo is a satellite of the totalitarian regimes of Putin and Maduro.
She said that she will expel Venezuelans from Ecuador, "as is done in the United States," showing a xenophobic stance. "Recognizing Maduro in order to expel Venezuelans from the country, shows a lack of humanity that contradicts her leftist discourse," said analyst Ricardo Flores.
She said, falsely, that she had expelled Ronny Aleaga from the Correista movement. In reality, Aleaga resigned after being linked by the attorney general’s office to drug traffickers (before joining the movement he had been the leader of the Latin Kings gang, an organized crime group). Noboa recalled that it was Luisa González herself who proposed Aleaga for the Legislative Administration Council (CAL).
González admitted that in the chats of the "Blue League" they called her “Kermit the Frog” ("Rana René" in Spanish), that is, a puppet of Correa. At one point she said, "I may be the frog, but not of the cartel of the toads", without clarifying what she meant (it should be mentioned that Maduro's government has been linked to the "cartel of the suns").
She used several epithets to refer to Daniel Noboa, including liar, rude (“majadero”), a person who suffers from attention and comprehension deficit, who does not understand, who is stupid, who mistreats people, and she even mentioned Noboa's daughter. In reality, she was the only rude person in the debate; if the roles were reversed, and Noboa had treated Luisa that way, he would already be facing accusations of gender violence.
Luisa falsely said that Diego Borja had written his article "An orderly way out of dollarization without dying in the attempt" when he was studying in Louvain BEFORE dollarization. Actually, he published it in August 2000, a few months AFTER dollarization. Noboa repeated several times "Luisa de-dollarizes you" (I used this phrase in 2023 in an article).
Luisa could not disprove that she has been glossed by the Comptroller’s Office on two occasions for a total of $900,000, one of them for the misuse of the presidential plane.
Although González affirmed that she would not give a safe conduct to former Correista Vice President Jorge Glas, she contradicted herself by saying later that she would comply with the laws (which allow safe conducts to be granted under the request of another country that provides asylum to the implicated).
Many users on social media questioned the insults hurled by Luisa against Noboa, as well as the fact that she repeated the phrase "Daniel, don't lie again", copied from Guillermo Lasso in his 2021 debate with Andrés Arauz.
She did not manage to disprove Noboa's accusation of corruption evidenced in the chats of Augusto Verduga, in the “Blue League” case, in which, he insisted, the presidential candidate of Correismo appears, with the alias “Kermit the Frog”, and in which Andrés Arauz speaks directly with Verduga to take over the Council of the Judiciary, the Superintendence of Banks, among other institutions.
Noboa affirmed, based on the chats of the “Blue League” case, that the Correismo movement wanted to take control of the financial sector to continue with money laundering.
Luisa repeated "my government" several times to refer to Rafael Correa's regime (despite the fact that she has sought to distance herself from her mentor or puppeteer). This allowed Noboa to foist on her the many cases of corruption of that regime, such as the $1,200 million spent on flattening a land for the non-existent Pacific Refinery.
The candidate did not acknowledge that "Luisa González, when she was Minister of Labor for a day, issued Ministerial Agreement No. 2017-0094 [which] eliminated [the] bonus and limited the dismissal of public servants to take voluntary retirement due to retirement."
In short, we will have to see what the serious polls say, but it seems to me that, with the debate, Noboa managed to transform a statistical tie into a slight lead.
Luisa González was called “Kermit the Frog” in secret chats of the Correismo movement.