The assassination of Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio less than two weeks before the elections has shaken the South American country, prompting some rivals in the race to suspend their electoral campaigns and highlighting the issue of growing violence.
Villavicencio, a critic of corruption and organized crime, was assassinated Wednesday during a nighttime campaign rally in northern Quito.
A suspected perpetrator later died of injuries sustained in a shooting, and six other suspects have been arrested so far, the country’s attorney general’s office said. Nine people, including a legislative candidate and two police officers, were injured, he added.
The dead suspect had previously been arrested for possession of weapons, the government said on Thursday, adding that the other six were all foreign nationals belonging to organized crime groups, without providing further details.
“The National Police of Ecuador has already made the first arrests of the alleged perpetrators of this execrable act and will use all its operational and investigative capacity to clarify the motive of this crime and its intellectual minds,” the Justice Minister Juan Zapata.
President Guillermo Lasso said the crime was clearly an attempt to sabotage the election, but that the vote would go ahead as planned on August 20, albeit under a state of national emergency, with law enforcement deployed to ensure safety.
Lasso also declared three days of mourning in the country.
Violence in Ecuador has increased in recent years, especially in cities along drug routes such as Guayaquil and Esmeraldas, where citizens say they live in fear.
Several Latin American countries have faced similar problems after the coronavirus pandemic.
Villavicencio’s Movimento Construir party on Thursday rejected what it described as “political use” of his death and called for a swift investigation.
The party referred to an unverified video circulating on social media allegedly depicting a group called Los Lobos claiming responsibility for the Villavicencio murder and threatening candidate Jan Topic.
Neither police nor the attorney general’s office have responded to requests for comment on the authenticity or origin of the video, which shows masked men dressed in black brandishing high-powered rifles.
“Those who sit down to negotiate with the bandits, who open the microphones for them, who generate scare campaigns with fake videos on behalf of criminal organizations and who lie under the name of Fernando Villavicencio, are responsible for the crime,” said Movimento Construir in the social networking platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Los Lobos reportedly has thousands of members and is involved in the violent situation in the prison system of the country.
Source: Terra
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