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Ecuador arrests Luisa González, Noboa's two-time runoff rival, in money laundering case
Police detained the leftist former presidential candidate in her home village in Manabí before dawn on Thursday. She called the charge absurd and accused President Daniel Noboa of running a dictatorship.
Key points
- Luisa González was detained in Canuto, Manabí province, in the early hours of Thursday.
- Prosecutors say the arrest is part of the Laberinto money laundering case over 2023 campaign financing.
- The arrest comes five weeks before local elections from which her party has been suspended.
Police in Ecuador arrested Luisa González, the leftist politician who twice lost presidential runoffs to Daniel Noboa, in the early hours of Thursday, in an investigation into how her 2023 campaign was paid for.
Officers from a Quito-based investigative unit, working with the Attorney General’s Office, detained her in Canuto, a rural village in the Chone area of Manabí province where she grew up. Prosecutors said the operation ran in Pichincha and Manabí provinces and that arrest orders had been carried out so that charges of money laundering could be brought against three people under investigation.
Two cases, one campaign
Prosecutors placed the arrest within a case they call Laberinto (labyrinth), which looks at alleged irregularities in political financing and campaign advertising spending during the 2023 presidential election, including possible money laundering and doubts over where contributions came from. Seven people are under investigation in that case, González among them.
A separate inquiry opened earlier this year, known as Caja Chica (petty cash), alleges that illicit cash from Venezuela helped fund the 2023 ticket of González and her running mate Andrés Arauz. Investigators raided her home in that case in January. Former president Rafael Correa, Arauz and several others are named as suspects in it. The sources available did not make clear how prosecutors link the two investigations.
“An absurd accusation”
González, of the Citizen Revolution (Revolución Ciudadana) movement founded by Correa, answered on social media within hours. She called the charge “an absurd accusation” and said she would respond “with the dignity of Ecuadorians who owe nothing”.
“Attacks on freedoms and political persecution are a permanent reality under the dictatorship of Daniel Noboa,” she wrote, urging her movement and other progressive groups to show “unity, unity and unity” in defence of freedom and democracy.
Correa, who governed from 2007 to 2017, posted on X: “They arrested Luisa González. Enough is enough!” No response from Noboa’s government appeared in the sources available by Thursday evening in Ecuador.
Pressure on the left before local polls
The arrest comes five weeks before local elections. Citizen Revolution has been suspended from that vote at the prosecutor’s request, and González had tried without success to stand for prefect of Manabí on the ticket of the Indigenous party Pachakutik.
It also follows a run of actions against politicians from her movement. On Wednesday prosecutors raided the Quito municipal headquarters, in an operation linked to the capital’s mayor, Pabel Muñoz, who is seeking re-election. Aquiles Álvarez, the mayor of Guayaquil elected on the movement’s ticket in 2023, is serving a sentence in the maximum-security Cárcel del Encuentro.
Noboa beat González in the runoff of the 2023 snap election and again in the 2025 presidential election. No date for her first court hearing had been announced.