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Foreign.
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Hello. Welcome to another episode of Frankly Fukuyama. If you enjoyed this podcast, please like and subscribe to it. I'm very pleased to talk to the Honorable Daniela Salazar. Judge Salazar was a judge in the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court. She is a lawyer and a jurist with experience in the constitutional questions that have been rocking not just Ecuador, but a lot of other Latin American countries. Ecuador, as you know, as you may know, has been riven by a lot of polarization in recent years surrounding former President Correa. And the country has been highly divided between factions that are pro and anti Correa. And this has affected the legal system as well. In addition, Ecuador went from a relatively peaceful country to one of the most violent because a lot of drug trade has now been rooted through that country, and the level of citizen security has dropped very substantially. So, Judge Salazar, Daniela, if I may, maybe you could just provide a little bit more background of the general situation within which these constitutional controversies have taken place in your country.
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Well, thank you very much, Frank, for inviting me to be a part of your podcast. It's an honor to be here. And please just call me Daniela. There's actually a little bit of controversy here whether you can be still called a judge when you're not on the bench anymore, and we don't get called honorable like it is the. The tradition in other countries. So please just call me Daniela. And I'm, I'm really happy to, to be here. Thank you for that presentation of what's going on in Ecuador. It was all very accurate. As you said, Ecuador right now is, is undergoing a process of polarization. Yes. Also a progressive democratic backsliding. We live in constant political crises. And then there's also this unprecedented surge in violence that's coming from organized crime to the point that President Novoa, the current president, has officially declared the existence of an internal armed conflict. And this declaration triggered a major confrontation between the president and the Constitutional Court. All that in broader terms. And then in more recent events, our country just emerged from 30 consecutive days of paralyzing social protests. These protests were marked by violence, both from demonstrators and from the police and military forces. And in the middle of all this unrest, which is very far away from any constitutional moment, the president, President Navoa, has called for a plebiscite. It's going to take place on November 16, and Ecuadorians will decide whether to convene a new constitutional assembly to draft what would be the first constitution of Ecuador. So lots going on and lots to unpack in this, in this program.
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Maybe you can explain a little bit about the role of the Constitutional Court. How many justices sit on it, what authority does it have? A little bit of its history, sure.
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The Constitutional Court in Ecuador is a very new court in the sense that it was created by the 2008 Constitution that a lot of people associate with Rafael Correa. It is composed of nine judges that last for periods of nine years. And for the first years, I want to say the first 10 years of the court. So between 2008 and 28, the court operated under the shadow of political dynamics, so it didn't play a big role. And then I won't go too long into this, but that court was seized. Ecuador courts don't last very long. We had a vacancy, we didn't have a court for over six months. And in 2019, a new confirmation of nine justices started again. I was a judge at that moment, and the court started to become very active in basically setting limits to the government and deciding a lot of lots of cases. It's a very powerful court in comparison to other courts in the world already, the Constitution gives it lots of powers, and in the laws, it seems like every time the legislator doesn't know who should be the person with the power to do something, they say, oh, let's just give it to the Constitutional Court. So it has like over 30 different powers, and it decides about 20 to 30 cases a week. Now I'm saying it's powerful, and at the same time, I'm saying it decides 20 to 30 cases a week, which means it's actually not very powerful. A very powerful court would decide very few cases that have a lot of impact and not tons of cases. But the amount of powers that it has, even in very political questions, makes it still a very powerful court, despite the amount of cases and the amount of different powers that it exercises.
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Now it's President Noboa that is pushing for a constitutional convention and a new constitution. And what are his motives? What does he want to change in the constitutional structure of Ecuador?
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Well, this all started because President Nobody started to confront with the court on many issues, mostly since last year, since January last year. The confrontation against the court started because President Nawois declared an internal armed conflict and used that to declare a state of emergency. And the court kept saying, I don't see the requisites for determining that there is an internal armed conflict. Are there. An internal armed conflict would need a certain amount of intensity of the violence and organization of the groups. And the court said, I don't see that in the information that you're giving me, at least not for a state of emergency. And has been setting some limits on the use of the states of emergency since last year. And this confrontation kept growing and growing. This year when president got reelected, started a new period. In May, the president proposed new laws that were approved very fast by Congress because they were supposed to be laws of economic urgency. And the court said, stop, I'm going to put a stop to these laws. They violate rights and whatnot. And this confrontation with the court was the main reason for President Novoa to say, we need a new constitution. We need a new constitution because probably they want to get rid of the court, but also the inability to fully tackle all this violence. President Novoa has blamed it on the court and on the current Constitution. And because, as you said at the beginning of the program, that the Constitution is associated with Correa, we don't know exactly what he wants, but we know he blames the Constitution and he blames the court for not being able to fully and effectively address all this violence. And so he claims that with a new constitution, he would be able to stop this increase of violence by organized crime. But we don't know exactly what he wants. He has said that he has appeared in some interviews saying things like, I want a new constitution of 180 articles, but we don't know exactly what it would look like.
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I hate to say, but this declaration of emergency and the wish to use a strong arm tactics against violence is very familiar in the United States. This is exactly what Donald Trump has been trying to do in introducing National Guard troops into Los Angeles, Chicago, you know, other cities that are currently governed by liberal mayors and governors. And I think we're having exactly the same fight because recently a federal judge told the Trump administration that she didn't think there was actually an emergency in Portland, Oregon, because, you know, there's a little bit of a scuffle at an ICE headquarters in the city. But no, you know, no widespread violence of any sort. I take it the level of violence in Ecuador is still substantially high. Higher than in the United States?
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Yes, yes, I would say so. I don't know the exact numbers in the United States. I do see the similarities. Sometimes I feel like there is a playbook that a lot of rulers are following. But the increasing violence in Ecuador is very scary. So that is true. I really don't think it merits calling it an internal armed conflict and using international humanitarian law instead of the regular protections that we have under regular constitutional law. But it is true that violence has extended all over the territory. Homicide rates are in record levels. Just in the first half of this year, there was a 47 increase in murders in the country. If we consider it with the same period last year. I was just reading. Sorry, I'm going to use my phone because I was just reading in the press today. Let me see if I find it. Maybe I won't. Here, here it is. In this year, 2025, there have been over 7,400 violent deaths just in this. In this year. If you compare it to previous years, you can see the increase in murders. It's. It's really big. You know what else has increased? Because the response has been a military response through this declaration of internal armed conflict. And military are not always well prepared to address this type of violence. Just like violence has increased, also state violence has increased. So the claims about crimes committed by armed forces have increased a lot. They are being pressured to show results. And when military are pressured to show results, more human rights violations are also reported. So we have claims of crimes like torture have quadrupled from like 50 or 52 cases in 2023, 195 cases in 2024. And I don't know the exact number right now in 2025, but it has increased a lot. The same with claims for extrajudicial executions, claims for just abuse of power, enforced disappearances. They have doubled in the last years. And we have now, because there's also cameras everywhere. We have seen some cases of disappearances, and everything's filmed on the streets. It's really, really painful. What's going on? Civil society organizations, and recently in a report from Amnesty International, they have documented about 43 people disappeared after being arrested by irregular operations and rape carried out by. By the military just since President Ngoa declared this internal armed conflict. So this is something that's going on. And just to give you one more number that I find very, very scary. The data says that this Last school year, 2,000 children did not go back to school. And the main reason is violence. Either they're being dragged to organized crime or simply they're scared and they're being kept at home because it's too dangerous to go to the streets. There have been more than 336 children this year, 2025 victims of violent deaths. And so people are very, very scared. And children are not even going to school because of this. This is something that should really scare us and move us to do something about it. And I'm not sure a new constitution is the answer.
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I think That'll also have a very bad long term effect on Ecuador if all these children are not being educated and prepared for the workforce. Now I imagine that everybody in Latin America is in a way operating under the shadow of El Salvador and President Bukele who did the Mano Duro tactics. He arrested a very large proportion of the young men in his own country claiming that they were gang members, put them in prison without any due process. But the crime rate has dropped fairly substantially there. And as a result he's been a very popular politician and I would imagine in Ecuador there's some effort to imitate those tactics.
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Yes, he's very popular. Bukele is very popular amongst a certain group of Ecuadorians who want to see the same results that they see in El Salvador. One of the things we do know about the new proposed constitution is that they want to change the protections that the current constitution gives to people deprived of liberty. That's one thing we do know. President Novo has been very clear that he wants to take away some of the rights that the current constitution grants to people who are accused of a crime, even if they haven't been convicted of that crime yet. The one big difference with Bukele though is here actually in Ecuador, the security crisis before it extended to the whole territory of Ecuador. It started within the jail system. This might sound crazy for someone coming from any other country, but the government completely lost controls of the prison. I'm not saying the government of Novoa, this goes back to Lenin Moreno. So the next government, Guillermo Lasso and the current government. Between 2018 and 2023, 680 persons deprived of liberty were murdered inside the prisons once President Novoa declared declared an internal armed conflict. Part of that armed conflict is in theory taking place inside the jail system because the gang members are killing each other inside the prisons. Just until between the declaration of an internal armed conflict. And middle, I don't know, may or so this year, when I checked the last numbers, more than 500 prisoners had already died in prison. These are people under the state custody. The state should grant their lives, make sure that they can't even kill each other, that there are no weapons inside prison. But massacres keep occurring inside the jail system and to the point that they stop being in the news because it keeps happening, that, you know, we wake up and you know, 17 persons died and then 40 something persons died in very violent massacres inside the jail system, that the government has not been able to fully recover its control.
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Yeah, that's very interesting. It's not Unprecedented, actually, in Los Angeles. The Salvadorian gangs had been organized, you know, and were fighting each other. And as a result, the American authorities decided to send them back to El Salvador, which didn't have the capacity to really control them. And I think the Maras there, like Mara Salvatrucha, got their start, actually, in Los Angeles prisons, and then, you know, blossomed again when they went back to El Salvador because the Salvadorian authorities didn't really have the ability to control that kind of violence. So that's an unfortunate, you know, precedent that's happening. So do you think that if you do get this new constitution, that this will be an excuse for unleashing a lot of police violence or. We don't know exactly how the president plans to use that kind of power.
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Yeah, there is a lot of things we don't. We don't know yet. It does seem to me that one of the things that the current government is looking for is impunity for certain crimes committed by the military and police forces during the last year and a half since they declared an internal armed conflict. That's part of his, you know, his narrative and his discourse to make sure that the police know that he's behind them and he will stand behind them and that they shouldn't be responsible for the crimes or the disappearances and the extra judicial executions that are being reported. We don't. We don't know yet that's which. Which is very strange because Ecuador wants some. Or this government, in theory, wants some international investment in Ecuador and it want to open its doors to economic investments. But, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty. I'm not sure international companies are going to want to invest in a country like Ecuador. That might change all the rules of the game again, starting this November, if people say yes to. To this call from President Novoa. So there is a lot of uncertainty in the country. If people say yes, then we're going to elections again to elect who is going to draft the new constitution, and then we go to elections again where the people may say yes or not to the new constitution that they will draft, and we will probably go to elections again because new constitutions usually say they change the requisites of who can be president or who can be a congressperson and things like that. And so we go again to elections. So we're going to be in a current political campaign for the next year and a half or two. In the middle of all this violence, I feel like there's going to be a lot of distractions for People to be thinking about all the elections when we should really focus on how to tackle this violence. And as you said, how to tackle these structural reasons that are causing this violence, the structural reasons for inequality that might just make this violence even worse.
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So how have you been faring through all of this as a member of the Constitutional Court that was trying to put some constraints on state violence? Have you been personally threatened? Do you personally feel secure right now?
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Right now, I am a lot more secure than the members of the court. The members of the court have been institutionally and personally attacked and targeted by this government. There's always protests against the court, and there's always a risk that someone is going to be very unhappy with the court. That's part of the job. But the government itself organized a march against the court where President Navo marched himself against the court. On the day of the march, the president put up. Well, I don't know if it was the president, actually. I shouldn't say that. But suddenly, in the day of the march that the president convened, there appeared huge, gigantic signs all over the city with the faces of the nine judges blaming them for the lack of peace in the country and blaming them for insecurity. And even with that count down, no count up with a marker saying, you know, every violent death and saying, these are the people who are to blame for all these deaths. All that happened on the same day of the march. So it was a little suspicious. I don't know who exactly paid for those big billboards that appeared all over the city. And there have been attacks to the member of. To the members of the court. And I still think that the members of the court are in a much better situation than most judges in the countries. The judges that are having the toughest time are those in small cities in, you know, mostly in the coast of Ecuador where narco traffic is happening. Not only judges, also prosecutors and judges. There have been many assassinations of judges and prosecutors. Prosecutors, and I don't think they have the conditions to do their job right now.
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These are assassinations and threats coming from the drugs, traffickers.
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Yes, mostly from. From the drug traffickers. So it's very hard to do your job for. For those people who are working with the criminal cases, because it's like either, you know, sometimes they. They are being offered to be paid money by, you know, narco business who want impunity. And even if they don't accept, then they just get killed. In. In Spanish, we say plata o plomo, which means like money or money or lead you know, they don't really have a choice.
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Yeah, that's a threat that's used against policemen in Mexico. I mean, throughout the region, you have that problem. Well, Daniela, thank you for that update. It's a global problem. I think that there's been this struggle in many, many countries, including the United States, where judges are trying to uphold a rule of law against, you know, populist politicians that don't want to have constrained power. You know, in many ways, we're suffering of a version of the same problem that you are, and this is true in Mexico, in Peru, Colombia and many other places. So thank you for this update. I wish you well. I hope that you stay safe and secure, and I hope that the rule of law survives. We met originally in September at a rule of law conference at the Stanford Law School where there were people from actually many other parts of Latin America. And I think everybody recognized that there's a crisis. There's a global crisis going on in which judges and prosecutors and people upholding the legal system are being threatened by populist forces in many places. So thank you for talking to me, and best of luck. And I hope that Ecuador rule of law survives this current crisis.
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Thank you so much, Francis.
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Thank you for listening to the Frankly Fukuyama Podcast. If you like this podcast, consider subscribing to American Purpose. And my Frankly Fukuyama column@www. Persuasion.com.