Who was Fernando Villavicencio, the Ecuadoran presidential candidate who was assassinated?
Villavicencio, 59, was a former investigative journalist and activist who served as a member of Ecuador’s National Assembly from 2021 until it was dissolved in May.
He was standing as a candidate for the Movimiento Construye political party in the race to succeed Lasso. He was among several leading candidates in the first round of voting on Aug. 20, though he was not the front-runner.
According to his campaign website, Villavicencio was born in Alausí canton, in Ecuador’s central Chimborazo province, on Oct. 11, 1963.
He studied journalism before working for Ecuador’s national oil company, Petroecuador, and later as a trade unionist, the website said. He then focused on journalism and also at one point worked as an adviser to National Assembly member Cléver Jiménez.
Villavicencio was a frequent critic of the administration of President Rafael Correa. In 2013, his home was raided, and he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for defamation against the president the following year. He fled to Indigenous territory inside Ecuador and was later granted political asylum in neighboring Peru. He returned to his home country in September 2017, after Correa left office.
After being elected to Ecuador’s National Assembly in 2021, he served as the chair of its Commission for Oversight and Political Control, where he pledged to focus on investigating corruption.
He was married and had three children.
What do we know about Fernando Villavicencio’s death?
Video footage shared on social media and confirmed by police appears to show Villavicencio getting into his car as he left the rally in the north of Quito on Wednesday evening, before multiple gunshots rang out.
He was shot in the head multiple times, according to two federal security officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the details of the assassination. The candidate was rushed to a nearby clinic, where he was pronounced dead.
Nine other people were injured, including a candidate for National Assembly and two police officers, according to the Ecuadoran attorney general’s office.
One suspected gunman was shot and detained by authorities at the scene, and died in police custody, according to the office.
Lasso, the president, said the attackers had also thrown a grenade to cover their escape, but it failed to explode and was safely detonated by police.
What were Fernando Villavicencio’s policies?
Villavicencio’s campaign focused heavily on drug trafficking and gang violence.
“In my government, the security forces will not act in response to the actions of criminals, we will act first,” he tweeted the day before his death, pledging to hunt down the leaders of criminal groups. “Only someone who isn’t linked to the mafias can defeat the mafias.”
He had also pledged to build a high-security prison in the Amazon to deal with the leaders of organized crime.
Before his death, Villavicencio had spoken out about threats he had faced on the campaign trail.
On July 31, he told reporters that he and his campaign team had received a serious threat from the leader of a group linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel and, referring to detained crime boss José Adolfo Macías by his alias, “Fito,” said: “If I continue to refer to him and his structure, they would attack me or make an attempt on my life.”
But he was defiant, saying: “Here I am showing my face. I’m not scared of them.” Video from another campaign event, which was posted by his official account, showed him saying that he would not wear a bulletproof vest.
After the killing, three of the eight candidates in the election race — Jan Topic, Yaku Pérez and Bolívar Armijos — announced they were suspending their campaigns out of respect for Villavicencio.
But Diana Atamaint, the president of the National Electoral Council, said voting would take place as planned on Aug. 20.
In his early Thursday statement, Lasso, the outgoing president, announced three days of mourning and a national state of emergency, saying that the armed forces would mobilize across the country to guarantee security of citizens and “free and democratic elections.”
He said that investigations into the killing are ongoing, adding: “We do not doubt that this assassination is an attempt to sabotage the electoral process.”
Arturo Torres, Samantha Schmidt and Diana Durán contributed reporting.
