Ecuador Presidential Candidate Is Assassinated During Rally
A presidential candidate in Ecuador who had been outspoken in regards to the link between organized crime and authorities officers was assassinated Wednesday night at a political rally within the capital, simply days earlier than Ecuadoreans vote in an election that has been dominated by considerations over drug-related violence.
The candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, a former journalist, was gunned down outdoors a highschool in Quito after chatting with younger supporters. A suspect was killed within the melee that adopted, and 9 different folks had been shot, officers mentioned.
“When he stepped outside the door, he was met with gunfire,” Carlos Figueroa, who labored for Mr. Villavicencio’s marketing campaign and was on the rally, mentioned of the candidate. “There was nothing to be done, because they were shots to the head.”
Mr. Villavicencio, 59, was polling close to the center of an eight-person race. He was among the many most vocal candidates on the problem of crime and state corruption.
It was the primary assassination of a presidential candidate in Ecuador and got here lower than a month after the mayor of Manta, a port metropolis, was fatally shot throughout a public look. Ecuador, as soon as a comparatively protected nation, has been consumed by violence associated to narco-trafficking within the final 5 years.
“Outraged and shocked by the assassination,” President Guillermo Lasso wrote on the social media platform X, previously often called Twitter, late Wednesday, blaming the dying on “organized crime.”
The nationwide prosecutor’s workplace said on the same platform {that a} suspect had been shot and apprehended amid crossfire with safety forces, and had died shortly afterward. The workplace later mentioned the authorities had carried out raids and detained six folks in reference to the assassination.
The 9 different folks shot included two cops and a candidate for a National Assembly seat, based on the prosecutor’s workplace. There was no rapid details about the situation of the 9 folks; it was unclear late Wednesday evening whether or not any of them had died.
The killing is a serious blow to a nation that was already struggling deep financial, social and political upheaval.
“Electorally speaking, this year is the most violent in our history,” mentioned Arianna Tanca, an Ecuadorean political scientist. “I think that what is going to change is the way we conceive of politics. I think that from now on it becomes a high-risk profession.”
Ecuador, on South America’s western edge, witnessed a unprecedented transformation between 2005 and 2015 as thousands and thousands of individuals rose out of poverty, driving the wave of an oil increase whose income had been poured into training, well being care and different social applications.
But extra just lately, the nation has been dominated by an more and more highly effective narco-trafficking trade. Foreign drug mafias have joined forces with native jail and avenue gangs, unleashing a wave of violence not like something within the nation’s current historical past. Homicide charges are at report ranges.
Today, the violence is usually horrific and public, meant to induce worry and exert management: There are common studies of automotive bombings, beheadings and youngsters being gunned down outdoors their faculties.
Complicating the state of affairs, Mr. Lasso disbanded the nation’s opposition-led National Assembly in May, a drastic transfer he made as he confronted impeachment proceedings over accusations of embezzlement.
The transfer, which is allowed underneath the Constitution, meant that new elections for president and legislative representatives can be held. The vote through which Mr. Villavicencio was imagined to compete is about for Aug. 20.
Mr. Villavicencio, who had labored as a journalist, activist and legislator, gained prominence as an opponent of correísmo, the leftist motion of former President Rafael Correa, who served from 2007 to 2017 and nonetheless holds main political sway in Ecuador. A presidential candidate who has Mr. Correa’s backing, Luisa González, is main within the polls.
Mr. Villavicencio wrote typically about alleged corruption within the Correa authorities, which made him the topic of authorized persecution and dying threats. He briefly sought political asylum in Peru.
In 2017, Mr. Villavicencio efficiently ran for a seat within the National Assembly, the place he served till the legislature was dissolved by Mr. Lasso.
Mr. Correa, writing on the X platform late Wednesday, lamented Mr. Villavicencio’s dying. “Ecuador has become a failed state,” he wrote. “My solidarity with his family and with all the families of the victims of violence.”
Grace Jaramillo, an Ecuadorean professor of political science on the University of British Columbia who went to school with Mr. Villavicencio, remembered working in opposition to him in an election for scholar physique president. He ran as a Trotskyist, and he or she represented a celebration referred to as Democracy in Our House; each misplaced, to a scholar representing the Chinese Communist Party.
“He was really a fighter all the time and very good at arguments,” Ms. Jaramillo mentioned. “An arguer, a challenger. He used to love lively discussions.”
After college, she mentioned, Mr. Villavicencio grew to become a union chief at Petroecuador, the nation’s nationwide oil firm. Soon after Mr. Correa got here to energy, he began writing about authorities corruption as a political journalist.
Ms. Jaramillo mentioned she met with him on the time to provide him recommendation. His home had been raided, and he had no cash to battle the costs that had been introduced in opposition to him, she mentioned.
“He was downtrodden. He felt bullied and diminished,” she added.
But a couple of weeks in the past, when she noticed him on a visit to Quito, he was “really hopeful and enthusiastic,” Ms. Jaramillo mentioned. “He was convinced that he could make it to the second round” of the presidential election.
His dying, she mentioned, will likely be “a long-lasting memory of how difficult it is to fight corruption and to be safe at the same time.”