Ecuador Arrests Six Colombians in Slaying of Presidential Candidate

Six Colombians were arrested in connection with the assassination of an Ecuadorean presidential candidate in Quito, officials with Ecuador’s Interior Ministry said, hours after President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency to bring order to the country buffeted by drug-fueled violence.

A high-ranking police official said the Colombians are part of a drug-trafficking criminal organization. He said some of the suspects had been arrested in the past in Ecuador and had also committed crimes in Colombia, where U.S. officials say the cocaine trade is flourishing.

The official said the police were investigating two possible motives for the Wednesday killing of Fernando Villavicencio, but declined to provide additional information. Villavicencio, 59, was a former congressman and journalist who had railed against graft and pledged to battle drug gangs if elected president.

“They are part of organized crime,” the official said. “They are connected to drug trafficking and other crimes.”

The developments came after Lasso declared a 60-day, nationwide state of emergency that curtails civil liberties such as freedom of movement and the right to assembly. It takes force as several other candidates suspended their campaigns following the killing, the first time a presidential hopeful has been assassinated in Ecuador. 

Lasso also declared three days of national mourning and said the Aug. 20 election will go forward as planned. 

“We aren’t going to hand over power and the democratic institutions to organized crime,” Lasso said in televised comments. “The elections aren’t going to be suspended.” 

Villavicencio was killed after leaving a campaign event at a school in the capital, Quito. The attack occurred during the evening rush hour, near the city’s busy financial center. 

The shooting in front of crowds of supporters just 11 days before the vote has rattled Ecuadoreans, who are already grappling with a surge in violent crime. Drug gangs fighting for control of cocaine trafficking routes have unleashed bloodshed across what had once been a relatively peaceful country.

“Everything was so confusing. There was so much chaos. People didn’t know what to do. They were crying and very scared,” said Diego Torres, a photographer who was walking with his wife about a block from the school when he heard what he said were shots fired from high-powered rifles. “This was on another level, a more advanced level of criminality.” 

Torres, who has covered Ecuador’s crime wave, said he approached the scene after the gunfire stopped. He said he was told by police to move back because they had found two grenades that hadn’t exploded. Lasso said the hit men threw a grenade that didn’t explode to distract authorities as they fled.

Three police officers were injured in the attack on Villavicencio. In addition to those who were arrested, a suspected gunmen died of wounds sustained during an exchange of gunfire with police, officials said. The candidate had been using an armored vehicle during the campaign, however police said it had been left behind during a recent trip to the coastal city of Guayaquil.

There were conflicting claims of responsibility for the shooting. In a video posted on X, the site previously known as Twitter, heavily armed, masked men who said they were from one of Ecuador’s biggest and most violent gangs, known as The Wolves, claimed responsibility for the killing. Later, another video with unmasked men who also claimed to be members of The Wolves said the gang wasn’t involved. The Wall Street Journal couldn’t verify the authenticity of the videos. 

Villavicencio had recently said that he had received threats from another gang, known as the Choneros, which security experts say has ties to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. 

Villavicencio’s death has drawn comparisons to the 1989 assassination of Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán, who was killed by henchmen of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar after Galán campaigned on pledges to extradite drug traffickers to the U.S. Colombian security officials were also involved and convicted in Galán’s killing. 

The killing drew condemnation on Thursday from Washington to Beijing. U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan called it an assault on Ecuador’s democracy. China’s Foreign Ministry said that it hoped Ecuador would be able to hold safe elections. 

Antonio López, Villavicencio’s campaign director, said he left the rally a couple of minutes before the candidate was killed. López recalled Villavicencio telling supporters at the rally that he was proud to be hated by criminals and that if elected, he would give gangs 90 days to hand in their weapons before he went after them. López said the last death threat the candidate received was eight days earlier.

“Democracy has been gunned down and the fight against corruption has been mutilated,” López said. “His biggest fight was to combat the narcopolitics.” 

Other politicians have been killed in Ecuador in recent weeks. In July, a gunman assassinated the mayor of the port city of Manta, Agustín Intriago, while he was at a public event. A candidate for the National Assembly, Rider Sánchez, was gunned down in the coastal city of Esmeraldas last month. Luis Chonillo, mayor of a crime-ridden suburb of Guayaquil, narrowly survived an assassination attempt a day after he took office in May.

The bloodshed has raised concerns about the spread of political violence in the Andean country of 18 million people as organized crime takes hold.

“Experience in other countries like Colombia shows that organized crime often mutates into political violence,” said Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at Washington-based think tank Inter-American Dialogue.

“When it does so, the impact on democratic institutions and faith in the political system can be devastating,” Shifter said. “The metastasis in Ecuador has been shockingly rapid.”

Today, Ecuador is one of Latin America’s most dangerous countries. Homicides have quadrupled since 2019, reaching a record 4,800 last year and driving a surge in migration, mainly to the U.S., according to the Interior Ministry.

Police and security experts say record cocaine production in neighboring Colombia and violence among Ecuadorean drug gangs propped up by Mexican and Albanian cartels have sparked a wave of violence.

Violence has mostly hit cities such as Guayaquil, as gangs fight for control of cocaine trafficking routes to maritime ports. Police and residents say that gang enforcers gun down prosecutors and police, hang bodies from bridges, and recruit children to carry out hits.

With voters demanding better security, Villavicencio had pledged to crack down on drug gangs and organized crime that he said had close ties with Ecuador’s political elite. 

His party said it had discussed suspending his campaign because of safety concerns after the Manta mayor was killed. Villavicencio was adamant that they should continue campaigning, his party said. 

“Being silent and hiding in moments when criminals are killing citizens and authorities is an act of cowardice and complicity,” Villavicencio said at the time. “I ratify my decision to continue in the daily fight until we defeat the mafias.” 

Villavicencio said he would build a maximum-security prison in the Ecuadorean Amazon for gang leaders, increase antidrug cooperation with the U.S., and put the military in charge of ports that are used to ship cocaine. He also pledged to root out corruption in the government, police and the judiciary. 

Political analysts say that Villavicencio was one of the candidates with a chance to finish second in the first round vote on Aug. 20. Polls show that no one is likely to take enough votes to win the presidency outright in the first round. That scenario would require a runoff between the top two candidates in October.

Before entering politics, Villavicencio made a name for himself as a journalist, writing lengthy articles and books based on detailed investigations into government corruption, especially during the administration of former President Rafael Correa. His work helped lead to Correa’s conviction of corruption in absentia in 2020, analysts say. 

Correa, who is living in Belgium, lamented Villavicencio’s killing and expressed his condolences for his family.

“Ecuador has become a failed state,” Correa wrote on X. “My solidarity with his family.” 

In 2014, Villavicencio went into hiding in the Amazon after he was charged with defamation amid what rights groups called a crackdown on press freedom in the country by the Correa administration. Villavicencio spent part of the time living with an indigenous tribe and later fled to Peru where he sought asylum. 

After returning to Ecuador following the end of Correa’s administration in 2017, Villavicencio was elected to the National Assembly, where he led the oversight committee. 

He continued to investigate government corruption, producing reports on problems with Chinese-built infrastructure projects. He alleged that Chinese loans backed by oil shipments had cost the country billions of dollars and fueled graft. 

Evan Ellis, an expert on China’s relations with Latin America at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, said Villavicencio’s work on China’s growing influence in Ecuador influenced his own thinking on Beijing’s expanding role in Latin America. 

“For me, he was a really good guy who couldn’t help but tell the truth as he saw it, even if he sometimes shot himself in the foot and made enemies doing so,” Ellis said. 

—Jenny Carolina González contributed to this article.

Write to Ryan Dubé at [email protected]