The brazen assassination of a presidential candidate will hang heavy over Ecuadorian voters as they choose a new president this weekend, following the latest eruption of drug cartel violence in the once-peaceful nation.
The winner of Sunday’s vote will face an overwhelming public demand for security – but may not have the budget or the political capital to overhaul failed crime-fighting policies and fund new ones.
The killing of the journalist turned politician Fernando Villavicencio in broad daylight on 9 August – less than two weeks before the first-round vote – has transformed the presidential race. His name remains among the eight candidates on the ballot papers, but Christian Zurita, a close friend and fellow journalist, was chosen to run in his place.
Zurita, 53, has vowed to continue Villavicencio’s anti-corruption crusade and at a meeting with the foreign press on Thursday, he declared that organised crime was so deeply embedded in Ecuador that the country had become a “narcostate”.
“It is a process of total deterioration of social conditions in places that didn’t know violence,” he said.
Flanked by a special forces police officer, he said: “How long are we going to put up with it so that it doesn’t spread any further? This is going to grow and we have to stop it.”
Zurita, who was present when his friend was shot, said he believed Villavicencio had been assassinated because he planned to militarise the country’s ports – key gateways for cocaine smuggling.
Police have arrested six suspects over the murder – all described as members of Colombian crime factions; another was killed in a shootout. But there is still no clarity over who ordered the killing, why Villavicencio did not have his usual armoured car – and how the gunman was able to penetrate three rings of security.
Zurita repeated an allegation that the country’s police knew who was behind the murder and called for their ranks to be purged. “Decisions must be taken on the police leadership,” he said. “It will be one of the most important guidelines left by Fernando Villavicencio. Whose side are they on?”
Villavicencio, who had received repeated death threats, was considered brave to the point of recklessness, even giving a campaign speech in Chone, the home city of the Choneros gang, whose jailed leader, Jose Adolfo Macías, alias “Fito”, reportedly threatened the candidate in the weeks before his murder.
His combative stance won him supporters among Ecuadorians tired of crime and violence. In the South American nation of 18 million people there has been a surge in violent crime as rival drug-trafficking gangs perpetrate prison massacres and attacks in public places. Murder rates have increased fivefold in as many years.
Marielena Romero, a café owner in Quito, said she ran her business behind closed doors for fear of robberies or assaults. “My business is affected because I don’t open the café fully. I feel it’s too risky.”
But despite her fears, she said Villavicencio’s assassination had made her even more determined to vote. “The need to vote has never been so clear. I believe democracy is the only way we can escape this situation.”
Ecuador’s interior minister, Juan Zapata, said more than 100,000 police and military officers were being deployed to secure the election process.
Celeste Jaramillo, who had been living in the US for 15 years, returned to visit her children and grandchildren, as well as vote. “We never thought that the situation could become so terrible, we feel there are no principles, no one to believe in,” she said.
She said Villavicencio “had the courage to confront it and the information and evidence to put a stop to the shamelessness in the country”.
Security analysts say the country’s nosedive into a violent drug war has a precedent in the region: in neighbouring Colombia, three presidential candidates were assassinated – and an airliner carrying 107 people was bombed in an attempt to kill a fourth – before the 1990 election.
“The situation we are in now is the same situation that Colombia was in when it was the [world’s] most dangerous country,” said Gen Paco Moncayo, a military officer who served as a national security adviser in the government of the outgoing president, Guillermo Lasso. “When the Medellín and Cali cartels were ravaging that state, what Colombia did was strengthen the state: judges, legislators, executives had a single plan, a single agreement.”
If Ecuador was to pull itself back from the brink, it could not rely on a military solution alone, Moncayo said.
Sandwiched between Colombia and Peru, the world’s biggest cocaine producers, Ecuador has become a key transit point for the drug. That has attracted criminal gangs able to buy guns, police officers and politicians. Both of Mexico’s most powerful factions – the Sinaloa and the Jalisco cartels – are present, as are other groups from as far afield as the Balkans.
By contrast, the Ecuadorian state has been under austerity measures amid declining revenues from taxes and the oil industry.
“The supreme weapon of drug-trafficking criminals is corruption; they need to corrupt judges, prosecutors, military, police, politicians and even mayors,” Moncayo said. “It is through corruption that drug trafficking takes over the sovereignty of the state and manages to besiege it.” Until that problem was tackled, nothing would improve, he said.
The official response to the crisis has been hamstrung by political infighting and mutual accusations of corruption among the country’s political elite.
Whoever is elected will only govern for about a year and a half, until 2025. The snap election was called by Lasso in May to stave off being impeached by a hostile parliament – which he then dissolved in a constitutional move.
“We want to fight,” said Jaramillo. “But there are times when we ask: what future is there for our children and grandchildren in this country?”
