Red Alert for Lawfare in Ecuador

Right now, Ecuador is undergoing the accelerated weaponization of the courts against the country’s most consequential progressive force — a calculated campaign to extinguish political opposition through the machinery of justice.

The case of Progressive International’s Council member Andrés Arauz is instructive — and urgent.

Arauz, the former presidential candidate for Ecuador’s leftist Citizen Revolution party, was formally charged in May 2025 by Attorney General Diana Salazar Méndez with “illicit association” in the so-called Caso Ligados — a case involving current and former members of the Council for Citizen Participation, accused of discussing strategies to promote allies within a state oversight body.

The charge is breathtaking in its audacity. It seeks to recast "political coordination" — the very lifeblood of any democratic process — as a "criminal conspiracy".

In another case, Arauz is among eight people under investigation, alongside presidential candidate Luisa González and RC legislator Patricio Chávez, with both González and Arauz simultaneously facing separate electoral tribunal proceedings over alleged campaign finance violations.

This is the latest chapter of a long and deliberate assault. For years, former President Rafael Correa has been the target of a lawfare campaign designed to destroy the integrity of the Citizens’ Revolution’s historic leadership through politically motivated judicial persecution, while tarnishing the movement’s legacy of poverty reduction, economic development, and solidarity across the Global South.

Since Lenín Moreno’s arrival to power, there have been relentless attempts to block the movement’s political participation — preventing the party’s own registration, banning its electoral vehicles, and barring Correa from the ballot.

What was once obstruction has since become something darker. In March 2026, acting on the request of the government-aligned Prosecutor General, an electoral judge ordered the nine-month suspension of the Citizens’ Revolution — Ecuador’s largest opposition party. The order was timed to coincide with the registration deadline for the 2027 local elections, locking the party out of the democratic process altogether.

Having moved to deregister the party, the government of Daniel Noboa has now pressed forward to pursue individual leaders one by one — a strategy of total persecution designed to break the movement’s spine.

Arauz himself has laid bare the mechanics of the operation: charges were filed against him the day before the Attorney General who brought them resigned. The following day, she was named ambassador to Argentina, with records confirming the appointment had been arranged months in advance, while she was supposedly acting as an independent officer of the law.

The assault on electoral democracy runs in parallel with the Trump administration’s cultivation of an alliance of right-wing Latin American presidents, whose members gathered at the “Shield of the Americas” summit in Florida in March 2026.

A transnational alignment of capital, conservative governments, and compliant legal institutions is actively working to foreclose the democratic pathways through which progressive alternatives rise to power.

Ecuador is the laboratory of this renewed assault on progressive forces in Latin America. If the experiment succeeds there, it will continue to steamroll across the hemisphere.