Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio has been killed in what President Guillermo Lasso called an assassination by unidentified individuals at a political rally in the country’s capital of Quito on Wednesday.
His death comes less than two weeks before Ecuador’s elections, scheduled for Aug. 20.
Video on social media show Mr. Villavicencio, 59, leaving his campaign rally at a school stadium surrounded by guards and entering a white truck. Around the same time, gunfire could be heard, and people at the event could be seen taking cover and screaming.
Ecuador’s attorney-general’s office has since said that one suspect in the attack has been arrested and died of wounds sustained during the attack. According to local media reports, several armed individuals opened fire on the candidate, who was shot three times.
According to early reports, several others were injured in the attack, although authorities did not say how many.
Mr. Villavicencio’s death comes amid a marked increase in violence in Ecuador, fueled by the growing presence of drug cartels in the country, with escalating drug trafficking and violent killings. It’s been a central issue in the presidential campaign.
Last week, Mr. Villavicencio mentioned that a drug trafficking gang leader had threatened him and his crew.
Mr. Villavicencio was married and is survived by five children.
“For his memory and his fight, I assure you that this crime will not remain unpunished,” Mr. Lasso said on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday. “Organized crime have gone very far, but all the weight of the law will fall on them.”
The Ecuadorean president said he would gather the nation’s top security officials for an urgent meeting.
Mr. Villavicencio, who served as a lawmaker until May when the Ecuador National Assembly was dissolved, was the candidate for the Build Ecuador Movement, and was one of eight presidential candidates for the election scheduled for Aug. 20. Opinion polls placed him at around 7.5 percent support, which ranks him fifth out of the eight candidates. He is known as the anti-corruption candidate.
Mr. Villavicencio previously belonged to the union at the state-owned Petroecuador oil company and later transitioned into journalism.
He started his work with El Universo. As a reporter, he was recognized for challenging corruption. Throughout his career, he has uncovered major governmental wrongdoing. For example, in 2015, he brought to light Ecuador’s covert operations that spied on journalists and political adversaries—Julian Assange among them—inside the embassy.
He was an outspoken critic of former President Rafael Correa, a socialist. In one instance, Mr. Villavicencio denounced Mr. Correa, a socialist, for signing deals with oil companies like China’s state-backed Petrochina that lost Ecuador almost $5 million in overpayments.
The Correa administration ruled from 2007 to 2017. For his statements made against the former president, Mr. Villavicencio received an 18-month jail sentence for defamation. He fled to Indigenous territory within Ecuador and was later given asylum in Peru. While there, all charges against him were dropped in February 2018.
Mr. Correa was found guilty of corruption in 2020 after he was accused of accepting $7.5 million in bribes in exchange for public contracts to finance his party’s electoral campaigns between 2012 and 2016.
As a legislator, Mr. Villavicencio was criticized by opposition politicians for obstructing an impeachment process earlier this year against the Ecuadorean president, which led the latter to call for the early presidential elections.
On Tuesday, Mr. Villavicencio had made a report to the Ecuadorean attorney general’s office about an oil business but no further details of his report were made public.
“Today more than ever, the need to act with a strong hand against crime is reiterated. May God have him in His glory,” fellow presidential hopeful Jan Topic said in a post on X.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times
