Casinos Coming Back to Ecuador? 2021-22 Edition

The new president, Guillermo Lasso, is in agreement with the idea that the casino industry should reopen in Ecuador in order to help grow national tourism.

That is the opening sentence and paragraph in the article I was referring to, published by the site Radio La Calle (the street) ...

Lasso's position was expressed in a conversation he had last year as a presidential candidate with Niels Olsen, now the incoming minister of tourism, according to the news article.  The author of the article is María Isabel Urbano.  The dateline is Quito, May 11, 2021.

"The state is not here to educate adult persons," said the now-president.  "The government is not here to prohibit beer drinking, going to a casino or a 'discoteca'."

Source... www.radiolacalle.com

I finally found a publication that explains what happened to the coastal consultation initiatives that would have allowed area residents to vote on whether to allow casinos to resume operations.

According to Games Brasil Magazine in an article dated February 2020 (shortly before the pandemic began), Ecuador's constitutional court ruled the initiatives to be unconstitutional.  The court ruled that Ecuador's national laws would have to be changed in order to make the planned votaciones valid.

So the voters in Manabí, Bahía de Caraquez and Salinas never got to vote on the casino issue.

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Presidente Lasso's support for re-opening casinos is important in that he was signaling he will not block the efforts to restore gaming in Ecuador.

However, it will take more than his support to produce that result.

According to the May 11 article at Radio La Calle, there are two options...

1.  A popular initiative needing one quarter of one percent of the electorate to present the issue to voters.

2.  A national referendum (that may contain issues beyond just casinos)
similar in form to the 2011 referendum that led to casinos' demise.

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According to my research, the only other country to have permanently banned casinos since the 1950's was Fidel Castro's Cuba, late in that decade, after overthrowing the government of the USA-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.  Batista had been heavily involved in Cuba's hotel-casino business.

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Casino/free-trade-zones left out of

national referendum.

El Presidente decided to limit his

referendum questionnaire for the

public to vote on .. to constitutional

issues.

This leaves out public input

via referendum on

potential free-trade zones where

the law against casinos might not

apply.

You can read about non-gaming

questions in the proposed referendum

at our new thread Ecuador National

Referendum 2023, reachable via

Expat.com's Ecuador forum

welcome page.

cccmedia in Quito