Presidential candidate Villavicencio assassinated TEN days to election
3 min read
Ecuador presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio assassinated at a campaign event only ten days to the election
Ecuador presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio assassinated at a campaign event only ten days to the election.
Ecuador presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, a vocal critic of corruption and organized crime, was killed at a campaign event on Wednesday, authorities said, amid an upsurge in violence in the Andean nation blamed on drug traffickers.
Local media reported some 30 shots had been fired at an event in the north of the capital, Quito. Video footage posted on social media showed Villavicencio getting into a car after the event, before the sound of apparent gunfire and screaming.
The outgoing President Guillermo Lasso vowed the killing would not go unpunished, saying that “organized crime has come a long way, but the full weight of the law will fall on them.”
He confirmed police safely detonated a grenade left behind by the killers.
Lasso declared three days of mourning and a national state of emergency, saying the military would mobilize to guarantee security.
Voting for a new president will go ahead as planned on Aug. 20, he added.
Villavicencio was shot and killed as he was leaving a campaign rally at a school north of the capital Quito, 10 days before the first round of the presidential election was set to take place.
Opinion polls had put him in the middle of the pack of the eight candidates, far behind the frontrunner Luisa González.
A legislator in the National Assembly, Villavicencio had been outspoken about corruption and the violence caused by drug trafficking in the country, telling CNN En Español Conclusiones in May that Ecuador had become a “narco-state” as he proposed to lead a fight against what he called the “political mafia.”
Video circulating on social media appears to show the moment Villavicencio was fatally shot.
The footage appears to show Villavicencio walking away from the campaign rally toward a vehicle surrounded by several police officers and a crowd of onlookers.
As he gets into the back seat of the vehicle, at least 12 gunshots can be heard.
A policeman quickly closes the door behind Villavicencio and many people are seen taking cover from the gunfire, including his security detail.
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The slain politician’s sister Patricia Villavicencio attended the rally and said she was standing behind her brother before he was killed.
She told reporters outside that she held the national government and the Interior Ministry responsible for the death of her brother.
“Where is the security?” she asked.
The assassination comes as Ecuador struggles with a deteriorating security crisis fueled by drug trafficking and a turf war between rival criminal organizations.
Though Ecuador has no history of producing cocaine, nor its main ingredient coca, it is sandwiched between the two largest narcotics production hotspots in the world: Peru and Colombia.
Ecuador has become an integral part in the lucrative cocaine trafficking routes from South America to North America and Europe, according to security experts.
The country has also lost control of its overcrowded prisons, which are often ruled by criminal gangs. Security forces have struggled to confront the gangs inside prisons, where inmates often take control of branches of the penitentiaries and run criminal networks from behind bars, according to Ecuadorian authorities.
Hundreds of inmates have been killed in brutal prison riots between rival gangs.
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