🚨 In this Episode:

Ecuador is one of the rare Latin-American economies that has zero price-tag chaos — and that’s thanks to its quarter-century embrace of the U.S. dollar. In 1999 the sucre collapsed, inflation hit 37 percent a year and banks went belly-up; twelve months later dollarization tamed prices and — even today — remains supported by roughly eight in ten Ecuadorians.

But political calm never followed monetary calm. We track the arc from Rafael Correa’s left-populist decade, which expanded the state while muzzling the press yet never dared scrap the dollar, through Lenín Moreno’s surprise liberal pivot and Guillermo Lasso’s failed reform push that ended in a “muerte cruzada”.

Now 37-year-old President Daniel Noboa confronts the region’s fastest-rising murder rate — 40-plus per 100 000 inhabitants — while promising to keep the hard-currency anchor, court investors and wrest back prisons from narco-gangs. Can Ecuador re-build institutions before violence, blackouts and populist nostalgia upend the gains of dollarization?

Press play for a data-rich journey through Ecuador’s economic miracle and democratic growing pains.

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Diego: @diegodelacruz

Rasheed: @rasheedguo

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