Guillermo Lasso

Guillermo Lasso dissolved Ecuador's legislature to avoid being removed by it, which was constitutional, unprecedented in practice, and ended his own presidency early. He came from a large family in Guayaquil, worked from his teens, built a career in banking and became head of Banco de Guayaquil, and was briefly economy minister during the crisis of 1999. He ran for president three times, losing narrowly in 2013 and 2017, and won in 2021 against a candidate backed by Rafael Correa - the first conservative to win in Ecuador in almost two decades. His term began with a genuinely successful vaccination drive during the pandemic and then ran into everything else at once: a fiscal deficit, indigenous-led national strikes in 2022 over fuel prices, and above all the collapse of public security as Mexican and Albanian trafficking networks turned Ecuador's ports into the main cocaine route out of South America. The homicide rate roughly quadrupled during his presidency and the prisons became battlegrounds, with hundreds of inmates killed in successive massacres. Facing impeachment in May 2023 over an embezzlement allegation he denied, he invoked the constitution's muerte cruzada clause, dissolving the assembly and triggering fresh elections for both branches, and governed by decree in the interval. He did not stand again. The snap election was won by Daniel Noboa after the assassination of the candidate Fernando Villavicencio. He is a member of Opus Dei and campaigned three times on an explicitly conservative platform. His government signed trade agreements with China and Costa Rica and reopened relations with the International Monetary Fund. The muerte cruzada clause had existed since the 2008 constitution and had never been used by any president before him. He left office in November 2023 after roughly two and a half years of a four-year term.

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