Jorge Yunda

He was a National Assembly member for Pichincha in 2017–2018 and Mayor of Quito from May 2019 until September 2021, when he was removed. He now belongs to the Avanza party, which Wikipedia describes as right-wing. He is Avanza's candidate for Mayor of Quito in the 29 November 2026 election.

Career

Yunda presided over the national radio and television council CONARTEL in 2007–2009 and the Club Deportivo El Nacional from December 2013 to October 2015. He belonged to Alianza PAIS in 2016–2018, sat in the National Assembly for Pichincha in 2017–2018, and was a member of Unión Ecuatoriana in 2018–2019. In the 2019 Quito mayoral election he took about 296,096 votes, 21.4% of the valid vote, and governed from May 2019 to September 2021. He joined Pachakutik in 2022–2023 and the Avanza party in 2026.

Controversies

Prosecutors charged Yunda with embezzlement over the municipality's April 2020 purchase of 100,000 PCR tests from Salumed for 4.2 million dollars, alleging that less sensitive RT-LAMP tests were accepted instead. On 22 September 2025 the Pichincha provincial court found him and 13 others not guilty, saying the state suffered no harm; prosecutors appealed, and a 2026 hearing left the appeal undecided in Primicias's latest report. The Quito council removed him as mayor on 3 June 2021 and the Constitutional Court confirmed his successor Santiago Guarderas on 29 September 2021. In 2022 the electoral tribunal fined him 13,500 dollars and suspended his political rights for two years for not complying with its ruling that the removal was lawful; the sentence became final in 2023.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia (Spanish) · Wikipedia · Vistazo · Primicias · Primicias · Vistazo

Photo: Luisag1995, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)