Friend of Assassinated Presidential Candidate in Ecuador Replaces Him in Race

Christian Zurita, a well-known investigative journalist, said Sunday he will run for president of Ecuador in place of his close friend and colleague Fernando Villavicencio, who was assassinated Wednesday by gunmen.

Wearing a bulletproof vest, Zurita said he would continue the fight against organized crime and drug trafficking that has turned the once-peaceful Andean nation of 18 million people into one of Latin America’s most violent countries.

“Fernando Villavicencio’s project is intact and we will fight for him,” said Zurita during a press conference in Quito. “We aren’t going to sit down and negotiate with any mafia. We just aren’t going to do it.”

Zurita’s candidacy for the Movimiento Construye political party still needs to be approved by Ecuador’s electoral authority, which analysts say should be a formality.

Zurita has a long career as an investigative reporter in Ecuador, where he often wrote about political corruption. He worked closely with Villavicencio, who was also a journalist and who made a name for himself by uncovering graft. The men collaborated on numerous investigations and wrote books together.

Zurita, who accompanied Villavicencio during the campaign, was one of the first people to make public that Villavicencio was shot. He posted videos of the chaotic aftermath that showed people screaming and huddling on the floor.

“They killed my friend,” Zurita wrote Wednesday on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, shortly after posting the video.

Unlike Villavicencio, who was elected to congress before he decided to run for the presidency, Zurita doesn’t have political experience. And with the presidential vote on Aug. 20, he will have little time to make his name known to voters before candidates need to end their campaigns on Thursday.

“The votes that the candidate receives are going to be driven by the sympathy that has emerged from the assassination,” said Sebastian Hurtado, president of Profitas, a Quito-based political risk consulting firm. “And as a longtime ally of Villavicencio with the same anticorruption focus, he is continuing the legacy of Villavicencio.”

Villavicencio, who was shot in the head on Wednesday while leaving a campaign event in Quito, had pledged to go after the powerful drug traffickers responsible for a surge of homicides. Homicides in Ecuador have quadrupled since 2019, reaching a record 4,800 last year, according to the Interior Ministry.

The violence has been driven by a war between gangs fighting for control of routes to transport cocaine through Ecuador that is produced in neighboring Colombia and later sent to Europe and the U.S.

Villavicencio had promised to root out corruption and purge the police, saying that organized crime had corrupted the political establishment and law enforcement.

Days before he was killed, Villavicencio said he received threats from the leader of the Choneros prison gang, one of Ecuador’s largest and most violent gangs.

On Saturday, President Guillermo Lasso’s government sent 4,000 police officers and soldiers to the prison where the Choneros leader was held in order to transfer him to a maximum security facility known as The Rock. Lasso also recently said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent a team to assist in the investigation.

Six Colombian suspects have been arrested in connection with Villavicencio’s assassination. Another suspect, who police say shot Villavicencio, died after being injured in a gunfight with officers.

“Ecuador is going to recover peace and security,” Lasso wrote Saturday on X.

Write to Ryan Dubé at [email protected]