Indigenous leader Yaku Perez makes official his pre-candidacy for Ecuador’s presidency

Yaku Perez, indigenous leader and anti-mining activist, made official yesterday, Thursday, his pre-candidacy for the Presidency of Ecuador in the early general elections to be held next August 20 in the country.

Perez, a 54-year-old lawyer, will participate as a candidate of a coalition of several leftist movements formed by Popular Unity, Democracy Yes, We Are Water, and the Socialist Party.

“Today we want to build a different, free, and clean path”, said Perez in a press conference, in which he affirmed that it is an honor to represent “the most humble people of Ecuador”.

He said that his vice-presidential running mate would be a woman from the coastal region and assured that with this, they would demonstrate that gender equity is essential in this alliance.

This is the first pre-candidacy for the Presidency that has been made official for the extraordinary general elections that were called on Wednesday by the National Electoral Council.

The call was made after last May 17 the Ecuadorian president, Guillermo Lasso, dissolved the National Assembly (Congress) after applying the constitutional mechanism of “cross death”, which contemplates calling for early general elections.

It also allows the president to govern by decree for six months, subject to the control of the Constitutional Court.

The president elected in the new elections must complete the term of Lasso’s mandate, which was to end in May 2025.

Perez was already a presidential candidate in the previous presidential elections of 2021, in which he came in third place, a result that the indigenous leader questioned amid allegations of alleged anomalies in the vote count.

In those elections, the current president, the conservative Guillermo Lasso, won in a second round against the leftist Andres Arauz, who is close to former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017).

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