Millions of Ecuadorians will have seen the phone camera footage showing the last seconds before presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was killed, shot through the windows of a white pickup truck after being escorted by unarmed policemen who were helpless to save him.
The images that followed showed panic and chaos as the burst of gunfire sent screaming supporters to the ground. Another clip filmed inside the campaign meeting, which Villavicencio had just left, showed panicked followers fleeing or ducking for cover and bloodstains on the tiled floor.
Ecuador, a South American nation of 18 million people, has lived through mass protests, autocratic governments and economic meltdowns. But the horror of the latest trauma etched on to the public consciousness, the country’s first political assassination, seems to be a defining sign of the times. The Ecuadorian government has said that six suspects arrested after the killing were all foreign members of organised crime groups.
For Símon Pachano, a political scientist at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Quito, the escalation is a “product of the penetration of organised crime into politics – specifically the drug cartels.”
Ecuadorians are fearful. Just a few years ago, their country was a haven. Now it has joined the ranks of the most violent nations in Latin America, with its homicide rate increasing fivefold since 2016 to become one of the highest in the region. The plunge into violent insecurity has prompted comparisons with neighbouring Colombia in the 1980s and the latest tragedy with the assassination of New Liberalism party candidate Luis Carlos Galán in 1989.
A series of prison massacres carried out by rival drug-trafficking gangs signalled violence was spiralling out of control. As bomb attacks and brutal killings in public places followed, security experts said Ecuador was under attack from urban terrorism.
While all eight candidates in next Sunday’s presidential election had promised to address the surge in violent crime, Villavicencio, a former journalist who had collaborated with the Guardian, had repeatedly reiterated his intention to confront mafias such as drug traffickers, including in the weeks before his death.
“To remain silent and hide at a time when criminals are murdering citizens and authorities is an act of cowardice and complicity,” he said.
Friends and supporters gathered on Friday at a convention centre in the north of Quito to say farewell to the outspoken whistleblower-turned-politician who had revealed the links between organised crime and politics.
“He was the only one to face the bullets by speaking the truth,” said supporter Fabiola Cisneros.
“I want the world to know that Fernando Villavicencio, the bravest man in Ecuador of the last 15 years, was murdered for denouncing and fighting against drug trafficking,” said Martha Roldós, daughter of former president Jaime Roldós Aguilera who died along with her mother in a plane crash in 1981.
“I believe he left a challenge to all Ecuadorians; we cannot vote for those who authorise narco-politics and mafias,” she added. Christian Zurita, a close friend and fellow journalist, vowed to investigate who was behind his murder. “What we need is for the prosecutor’s office to do its job ... and to encourage the police to do theirs because they know [who did this],” he said.
Villavicencio was fearless to the point of recklessness, refusing to wear a bullet-proof vest on the campaign trail. In the weeks before his murder, he reported on national television receiving multiple threats from Jose Adolfo Macías, alias “Fito”, the jailed leader of the Choneros gang, the local armed wing of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel. “Here I am, standing up to them. I am not afraid of them. I have spent 20 years in this country fighting against these criminal structures, and I reiterate: I am not afraid of them,” Villavicencio said.
Security experts have questioned why the candidate was so exposed in his final moments; the lack of a security cordon, the fact the police were unarmed, and that Villavicencio was not being transported in a bullet-proof vehicle have prompted accusations of negligence or, worse, alleged complicity in his death. “It has raised suspicions about the penetration of the police by narco-trafficking,” said Pachano, alleging that the judiciary was also corrupted. “Judges are threatened and liberate the suspects,” he added, suggesting that many faced the “plata o plomo” conundrum – the money or the lead.
In early 2021, the US ambassador to Ecuador, Michael Fitzpatrick, made a pointed remark about “narco-generals” referring to high-ranking members of the Ecuadorian security forces with alleged links to drug trafficking. Days later, Ecuador’s president, Guillermo Lasso, said he thought the ambassador could not have been referring to generals in active service.
But a year later at a presentation made by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Fitzpatrick doubled down on that remark in an excoriating critique of corruption in Ecuador’s judiciary, accusing it of ceasing to do its job and providing a “camouflage to protect narcos, thugs or their paid frontmen to clean their reputation, their money, their public image”.
Last year, Fitzpatrick’s government withdrew a US visa from Ronny Aleaga, a former lawmaker for the Union for Hope party, after photos – revealed by Villavicencio – showed him sharing a swimming pool in Miami with two men wanted on corruption charges in Ecuador.
Villavicencio made his name as a crusading anti-corruption journalist during the 10-year leftist government of Rafael Correa (2007-2017). His whistleblowing had made him many enemies, not just in drug gangs but also in politics and the public sector, particularly the state oil industry.
At the same time, the cocaine trade is booming, according to the UNODC, with Europe providing much of the demand as fentanyl consumption takes hold in the US. In June authorities in Amsterdam seized 3.5 tonnes of cocaine in a shipment of bananas from Ecuador.
The consequences for Ecuador are that it is on the brink of becoming a narco-state. The security forces are unable to deal with the presence of Mexican and Colombian cartels and Balkan drug gangs exploiting Ecuador’s porous coastline and its large fishing fleets and shipping industry as a transit point for cocaine produced by its neighbours, Peru and Colombia.
All the while, Ecuador’s fractious political scene has been paralysed by infighting. Next week’s election was called by President Lasso in May to see off a looming impeachment bid by a hostile congress.
Whoever takes office in the coming months will face “serious problems, like the current one” says Pachano, and a security plan will require outside help from the US and Europe, the destinations for most of the cocaine that leaves Ecuador.
