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Candidates for the mayor of Guayaquil debate for the first time
Posted On 01 Mar 2019
Ecuadornews:
The proposals of 14 of the 17 candidates who want to be the new mayor of Guayaquil were exposed in the debate organized Thursday by the FARO Group, Diario El UNIVERSO, Telerama and the Coordinator of Popular and Educational Radios of Ecuador (Corape).
In three hours and in groups, they took the opportunity to reinforce their flagship proposal or ask the citizens to vote. The event was held in the auditorium of this newspaper.
When talking about security, mobility and the measures that they intend to adopt to reduce unemployment and extreme poverty, everyone stuck to the issue. When addressing gender, how to eradicate violence or work for equity between men and women, three candidates answered little or nothing and used their minute to present other proposals.
Jimmy Jairala, candidate for Centro Democrático (list 1), Francisco Jiménez, of CREO (list 21), Simón Bolívar Rosero, of Alianza PAIS (list 35) and José Inca, of Izquierda Democrática (list 12) were the most mentioned for their block mates and they had more time for replicas.
Some did not know each other. Gino Cornejo, of Adelante Ecuatoriano (list 7), mentioned the candidate “Jaramillo” to refer to Jorge Villacreses de Ecuatoriano Unido (list 4). And Jorge Coppiano of Unión Ecuatoriana (list 19) called Eduardo Argudo of the Socialist Party (list 17) to Inca, who, using his time, sent a greeting to former president Rodrigo Borja. He said to the air: “I hope to meet him one day.”
In most of the applicants there was confusion about the mechanics of the debate, and when they had to comment and replicate some of the proposals of their opponents what they did was to continue talking about their own plans.
The absence of the candidate who did not accept to participate in the debate, Cynthia Viteri, of the Social Christian Party (list 6), was alluded to by Jairala and by Martha Macías, from Sociedad Patriótica (list 3), who said that there were barely two women the Mayor’s Office and that only she had the courage to debate.
Juan Manuel Bermúdez, from the Libertad movement is Pueblo (list 9), broke the formalism by showing his plan presented to the Electoral Council and saying: “I am the father of this initiative” (reduce fines). To which Villacreses followed: “I am the dad of the security proposal”. For Inca, the podium was like a platform because of its high tone and gestures when speaking.
Edgar Salazar, of the Concertación (list 51), took advantage of each intervention to ask for the vote. They did the same, but at the end of their participation, Balerio Estacio, from Fuerza Ecuador (list 10); Patricio Buendía, from SUMA (list 23); Jaime Lomas, of Juntos Podemos (list 33), and six more candidates. (I)
