Presidential Candidate Assassinated in Ecuador Just Days Before Election

A former lawmaker and journalist running to be Ecuador’s next president was shot dead in the street on Wednesday night.

Fernando Villavicencio, who like the other 7 candidates in the election was standing on an anti-crime and anti-corruption platform, was gunned down as he left a campaign event in the capital Quito.

Video footage showed Villavicencio, 59, who was married and had five children, surrounded by guards and supporters as he got into the back of a car. But then gunshots rang out and screaming was heard as people ducked for cover.

Ecuador’s incumbent president, Guillermo Lasso, said elections would go ahead as planned on August 20, but declared a two-month state of emergency and three days of national mourning.

“For his memory and for his fight, I assure you that this crime will not go unpunished,” Lasso wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, adding that the criminal gangs he blamed for the assassination would face the “full weight of the law.”

Gang and drug-related violence has exploded in once-peaceful Ecuador in recent years. Earlier this year VICE News reported from inside the country on how Mexican cartels were battling for dominance over routes used to transport cocaine from Colombia through Ecuador.

Long regarded as one of the most peaceful countries in Latin America, Ecuador’s homicide rate jumped 245 percent between 2020 and 2022, with murders reaching 26.6 per 100,000 residents last year.

Police said that a suspect in the shooting of Villavicencio died from injuries sustained from gunfire that followed the assassination, while nine others were injured and six people were arrested in raids that followed.