QUITO, Ecuador — Daniel Noboa, the millennial president who in a truncated first term declared war on the gangs that turned once-peaceful Ecuador into a major cocaine trafficking hub, won reelection Sunday, electoral authorities reported, giving him four more years to try to stem the country’s rising violence.

With more than 90 percent of the vote reported, the 37-year-old heir to a banana empire held an 11-point lead over leftist Luisa González, a close ally of former president Rafael Correa, according to electoral authorities. Pre-election polls had predicted a much closer race.

Diana Atamaint, president of Ecuador’s National Electoral Council, said the results showed an “irreversible trend” and declared Noboa the winner of the election.

González rejected the results Sunday evening and said she would request a recount. She accused Noboa of electoral fraud without presenting evidence.

Noboa harnessed support for his ironfisted — occasionally brazen — approach to drug violence and corruption, a strategy that has yielded limited results in his brief first term but made some Ecuadorians feel safer.

He will be responsible for resolving a deepening security crisis in a country that has become both a booming cocaine transit point and a battleground for drug gangs: Violent deaths have shot up again this year, after a lull in 2024. February was the deadliest month in recent years, with 736 homicides, 90 percent more than in the same month last year.

Despite the worsening violence, Noboa managed to persuade voters to give him more time.

For many Ecuadorians, a vote for Noboa probably represented a safer option — a vote for continuity and stability, over a fear of return to Correismo, said Ecuadorian political scientist Andrés Mejía Acosta, associate dean for policy and practice at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.

Correa, president from 2007 to 2017, oversaw years of big spending and stability but grew increasingly authoritarian, eroding institutions, attacking critics and antagonizing the United States. Convicted of corruption in Ecuador, he’s living in exile in Belgium.

Noboa’s campaign sought to link Correa and, by association, González, with Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

Around Quito on Sunday, older voters appeared to make a strong showing. One of them was Alba Rosero, 78, who said she voted for Noboa because she felt he would be the most likely to bring security to the country — and preserve democracy.

“We need peace to work, to stand up, to get ahead,” she said. “What we need is democracy. What we need is freedom to be able to express our opinions.”

But Noboa has also been accused of sidestepping democratic norms, even ignoring electoral laws and court rulings in his campaign for president.

The country of 18 million people was once considered an oasis of peace in a conflict-ridden region. But it has become a key transit point for the record amounts of cocaine flooding Europe. Its location between the world’s top cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru, and its robust network of local gangs have made it an attractive hub for traffickers from around the globe. Ecuadorian gangs, partnering with Mexican cartels and Albanian drug traffickers, have become multimillion-dollar criminal enterprises that have penetrated key institutions throughout Ecuador’s government.

The unchecked rise of the gangs has brought record violence to Ecuador’s streets. Only 11 percent of residents in Guayas, the country’s most populous province, said they felt safe walking alone at night, Gallup reported in 2023. No region in the world, outside active war zones, reported a lower rate. The violence seeped into politics two years ago with the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, who had pledged to crack down on the gangs.

Noboa, seen as the heir to his billionaire father’s business empire, won that election, also against González, to serve the last 18 months of his predecessor’s term. Guillermo Lasso, a center-right reformer facing the possibility of impeachment, dissolved the National Assembly, resigned and declined to seek reelection.

The new president had been in office for only weeks when a gang revolt threatened the nation’s stability. In January 2024, riots broke out in prisons, car bombs exploded in several cities and armed men stormed the studio of one of Ecuador’s most widely watched news programs to hold more than a dozen staff members hostage at gunpoint as the cameras broadcast live.

Noboa responded with a declaration of “internal armed conflict,” a decree that named 22 criminal gangs as terrorist organizations and allowed authorities to mobilize the military against them.

“This isn’t just gangs fighting for four blocks,” Noboa told The Washington Post last year. “This is a fight for ports, for borders, for entire towns. … The dispute is over our way of life.”

Analysts say Noboa’s militarization of the country has done little to dismantle criminal structures, and human rights defenders have accused the government of arresting thousands with little evidence or due process — an approach they compare with that of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele. Intense fighting continued into this year: January was the country’s most violent start to a year on record.

Noboa has created an image of himself as a tough-on-crime leader who will do whatever it takes to eliminate impunity. In April, he instructed police to break into the Mexican Embassy to pull out Correa’s former vice president, twice convicted of corruption, who had sought asylum. The move, an apparent violation of the Vienna Convention, led Mexico to sever diplomatic relations with Ecuador but was well received at home.

Noboa’s popularity plummeted last year when an energy crisis led to daily 14-hour power cuts. And in March, a large oil spill in Esmeraldas state left 250,000 families without drinking water. Local authorities accused the Noboa government of negligence.

He has also stirred controversy with his recent alliance with Erik Prince, founder of the private security company Blackwater, to provide training to Ecuadorian military and police. Mejía described the partnership as the latest attempt by Noboa to privatize security and “bypass the state altogether.”

Santiago Basabe, a political scientist at San Francisco de Quito University, said Noboa hasn’t provided much of a plan or policies for the next four years. “The issue of security is not easy to resolve,” Basabe said. “It cannot be resolved in the short term.”

A win for González could have also created tensions with the Trump administration; Correa kicked the Americans out of a U.S. naval base in Manta in 2009, leaving Ecuador’s coastline largely undefended.

But some Ecuadorians said they supported González in a vote against Noboa and his performance.

“Noboa has not been able to solve the serious problems of insecurity, and he has dedicated himself to persecuting his opponents,” said Carla Argüello, a 26-year-old voter who works with a human rights organization. “He has violated the constitution and is very authoritarian.”

But Miguel Vallejo, 65, said he has seen Noboa’s policies reduce organized crime in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, the particularly dangerous province where he owns a business.

Before, he said, criminal groups would arrive at his business almost every day. But “since February of last year, when he declared war on them, much of the extortion stopped.”

Some of Noboa’s supporters say he needs more time to prove himself.

After a turbulent few years, taxi driver Daniel Argoti said, what he wants is simple: Continuity.

“I want things to be maintained but also improved,” said Argoti, 45, “because we’re not doing all that well.”

Schmidt reported from Bogotá, Colombia.