A mob of Lenín Moreno supporters disrupted a soccer game Guillermo Lasso was attending, and attacked attacked Lasso and his family as they left the stadium.
Frances Martel reports,
A leftist mob, some have identified as paid agitators, violently attacked Ecuador’s center-right presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso and his family Tuesday night as they attempted to leave a soccer match in the nation’s capital, Quito.
The mob – reportedly armed with bottles, sticks, stones, and knives – jeered the presidential candidate and his family and injured police detail assigned to escort the family out of Quito’s Atahualpa Olympic Stadium where Ecuador’s national soccer team was facing Colombia’s for a spot in the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The crowd shouted, “out, banker!” at Lasso – whose pre-politics career was in finance – while making noise with vuvuzelas and hurling projectiles at the family.
. . .“When we left the stadium, Alianza Paz [leftist party] militants began throwing bottles, sticks, and threatened us with knives,” Lasso said in a statement to the press. “All I could do was protect my wife with my body and receive the blows from the objects on my head.”
Lasso tweeted video of the incident,
The video clearly shows violent crowds pelting police officers and the Lasso family while hurling epithets at them. The younger Lasso accuses the government of socialist president Rafael Correa of hiring paid agitators to attack the family.
“My son Santiago narrates what we went through yesterday. The images speak for themselves. We don’t want this Ecuador for our children”
Esto es lo que vivimos ayer narrado por mi hijo Santiago. Las imágenes hablan por sí solas. No queremos este Ecuador para nuestros hijos. pic.twitter.com/LTbHHbQ0SL
— Guillermo Lasso (@LassoGuillermo) March 29, 2017
While the official surveys show Moreno ahead by five percentage points, 16 percent of their respondents said they were undecided.
Correa’s party has a lot riding on this election, as Mary O’Grady noted,
Mr. Moreno is Mr. Correa’s proxy in this election. A Moreno triumph is important if Mr. Correa is to be protected from the wide array of corruption investigations that his opponents are demanding.
Mr. Moreno would also act as a placeholder for Mr. Correa until the 2021 election, as Dmitry Medvedev was for Vladimir Putin from 2008-12. Legalized indefinite re-election would take care of the rest.
Correa vowed to annul the election results if Moreno doesn’t win next Sunday, through a maneuver by which the Ecuadorian Constitution allows him to dissolve the Executive and Judiciary branches and call for new elections.
In-country sources confirmed that OAS election monitors will not be allowed to be present at the electoral board headquarters.
