Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was killed in what President Guillermo Lasso called an assassination by unidentified individuals at a political rally in the country’s capital of Quito on Aug. 9.
His death comes less than two weeks before Ecuador’s elections, scheduled for Aug. 20.
Ecuador’s attorney general’s office has since said that one suspect in the attack has been arrested and died of wounds sustained during the attack. According to local media reports, several armed individuals opened fire on the candidate, who was shot three times.
According to early reports, several others were injured in the attack; authorities didn’t say how many.
Mr. Villavicencio’s death comes amid a marked increase in violence in Ecuador, fueled by the growing presence of drug cartels in the country, with escalating drug trafficking and violent killings. It’s been a central issue in the presidential campaign.
Last week, Mr. Villavicencio mentioned that a drug trafficking gang leader had threatened him and his crew.
Mr. Villavicencio was married and is survived by five children.
“For his memory and his fight, I assure you that this crime will not remain unpunished,” Mr. Lasso wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Aug. 9. “Organized crime have gone very far, but all the weight of the law will fall on them.”
The Ecuadorean president said he would gather the nation’s top security officials for an urgent meeting.
Mr. Villavicencio, who served as a lawmaker until May, when the Ecuadorian National Assembly was dissolved, was the candidate for the Build Ecuador Movement and was one of eight presidential candidates in the election scheduled for Aug. 20. Opinion polls placed him at about 7.5 percent support, which ranked him fifth out of the eight candidates. He was known as the anti-corruption candidate.
Mr. Villavicencio previously belonged to the union at the state-owned Petroecuador oil company and later transitioned into journalism.
He started his work with El Universo. As a reporter, he was recognized for challenging corruption. Throughout his career, he uncovered major governmental wrongdoing. For example, in 2015, he brought to light Ecuador’s covert operations that spied on journalists and political adversaries—Julian Assange among them—inside the embassy.
The Correa administration lasted from 2007 to 2017. For his statements made against the former president, Mr. Villavicencio received an 18-month jail sentence for defamation. He fled to indigenous territory within Ecuador and was later given asylum in Peru. While there, all charges against him were dropped in February 2018.
As a legislator, Mr. Villavicencio was criticized by opposition politicians for obstructing an impeachment process earlier this year against the Ecuadorean president, which led the latter to the call for early presidential elections.
On Aug. 8, Mr. Villavicencio made a report to the Ecuadorean attorney general’s office about an oil business, but no further details of his report were made public.
“Today more than ever, the need to act with a strong hand against crime is reiterated. May God have him in His glory,” fellow presidential hopeful Jan Topic wrote on X.
