The Ecuadorian Justice has in its hands the political future of Rafael Correa

Rafael Correa, former president of Ecuador, in Madrid in 2017.Patricio Realpe / GETTY

The return to power of Rafael Correa in Ecuador depends more on Justice than on the ballot box.

After seeing his options to participate in the next elections frustrated, the former president will hear this Monday from Belgium what will happen to his political future in the next decade.

A court has spent the weekend deliberating and in the afternoon - when it is either at night in Correa's time zone - it must communicate whether the trial for which he was sentenced to eight years in prison and as many disqualification from public office is he adhered to the procedure or if he had errors, before declaring whether the sentence is executed.

That resolution on the cassation appeals presented by Correa's defense and by 15 other convicts is the turning point for the politician.

If the court does not agree with you in the third instance, the sentence must be executed.

Until now, it was pending to exhaust the judicial process before the former president had to serve years in prison and with the impediment to continue in politics.

But as of this Monday, the former president will know if he is excluded from any electoral process during the next eight years - which could lead him away, due to the deadlines, even from the next three presidential disputes - and if he should go to jail for a similar period.

On him, there was already a prison order that never materialized because he lives in Europe and Interpol did not give way to the international arrest warrant.

Having not set foot on Ecuadorian territory since 2017, Rafael Correa has evaded that arrest, but also a trial that is still pending for the kidnapping of an opposition assemblyman and, this last week, he has been excluded from next year's presidential race.

The electoral authority did not take his application into account because the regulations require all applicants to formalize their participation in person, personally and without delegation.

It is a "persecution", he has repeated on numerous occasions to protest in all cases.

The importance of the court ruling for his political future was definitely evidenced last Friday, the last day of the cassation hearing.

The former president had not appeared throughout the trial, either in person or virtually.

Nor in the appeal instance.

But he did do so when judicial resources were exhausted to insist on the persecution argument and that all the evidence in the case was forged or manipulated.

“I have never allowed a bribe;

it is a political persecution, they are destroying families for persecuting me.

To try to incriminate me, names have been invented: green rice, bribes and written notebooks from a trip from Quito to Guayaquil ... Those files have been manipulated since 2018, ”Correa said on Friday, from the corner of a screen in the courtroom before to call on the court to "do justice and change history."

“Gentlemen magistrates, it is in your hands to stop.

Interpol rejects everything;

Belgium laughs at them ”, ridiculed the ex-president.

The decision that will be announced on Monday may face new appeals for expansion or clarification;

however, the court's position can no longer be altered.

It could also go to international bodies, but those other options do not invalidate the application of the sentence.

Along with Correa, 15 other defendants have been convicted - and are also awaiting the decision on their resources.

Among them, former Vice President Jorge Glas, imprisoned since 2017 for the

the former legal secretary of the Presidency, Alexis Mera, who was one of the ex-president's trusted men during his decade in office, and the former Minister of Public Works, María de los Ángeles Duarte, who broke house arrest in mid-August and went to take refuge in the residence of the Argentine ambassador in Quito.

In addition to the former Assembly members of Alianza PAIS, Viviana Bonilla and Christian Viteri, who also failed to comply with the precautionary measure of appearing before the judge regularly before reaching cassation.

The last time they appeared before the Guayas Court was on August 11, and their whereabouts have been unknown since then.

According to the Public Prosecutor's Office, the members of the Rafael Correa government leadership involved formed a network of irregular campaign contributions to the official party Alianza PAIS that operated between 2012 and 2016. This network moved more than seven million dollars (about 6.5 million euros), through exchanges of favors between government authorities and contractors.

In exchange for illegal financing, entrepreneurs received large infrastructure projects.

The State Attorney General's Office, which also acted as the prosecution, estimated the damage to the country at 21 million dollars.

The case came to light in April last year thanks to the revelation of the journalistic portal

, in which the code names of the senior officials and businessmen allegedly involved were exposed. Two of the accused collaborated with the Justice from the investigation stage. Pamela Martínez, adviser to the Presidency when Correa was in office, and Laura Terán, assistant to the latter, gave the Prosecutor's Office a notebook and Excel files in which they kept an accounting record of the payments received by the officials and how the transactions were carried out. entrepreneurs: in cash or with invoices for services not provided or with inflated prices. In exchange for criminal cooperation, both benefited from a lesser sentence that they are already serving. For Martínez it is 38 months and 12 days and for Terán, three months and six days.