The Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was shot to death this Wednesday afternoon, after an attack allegedly perpetrated by hitmen, in an event that has stirred the national conscience amid the insecurity crisis that plagues Ecuador and that increasingly seems getting worse.
Villavicencio, 59, was a trade unionist in his youth and advised the federation of workers of the state oil company, from which he was fired as a left-wing politician.
He graduated as a journalist from a controversial university that had already been dissolved and was denounced for handing out titles for money, but his prestige as an investigative journalist was built on suspicions of corruption that he launched against members of the administration of former President Rafael Correa (2007- 2017).
"Don Villa", as his supporters called him, was the incarnation of anticorreismo. One of his main feats was having sent the former president to the bench thanks to one of his investigations. Along with his colleague and friend Christian Zurita, he revealed the existence of a vast network of corruption, bringing the former head of state and government officials to justice for having received bribes from businessmen.
Correa, a refugee in Belgium and whom Fernando Villavicencio nicknamed "the fugitive", was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison for this case in a sentence that the ex-president calls political persecution.
Villavicencio ran for the presidential elections scheduled for August 20 in an effort to prevent Correísmo from returning to power.
Before running for the Presidency, he directed the Oversight Commission of the National Assembly (Parliament) between May 2021 and May 2023, until the current president of the country, the conservative Guillermo Lasso, invoked the constitutional appeal of "cross death" to dissolve Parliament and call extraordinary elections.
Villavicencio, who in many cases criticized Lasso, also defended him and some of his rivals considered him the secret candidate of the ruling party, something he denied.
Originally from the Andean municipality of Alusí, in the province of Chimborazo, in the very heart of Ecuador, Villavicencio also worked in information media such as the old Vanguardia magazine and was a political adviser to the former legislator of the indigenous movement Pachakutik Cléver Jiménez, between 2009 and 2017.
At that time both were sentenced to 18 months in prison for alleged insults against Correa, but he avoided jail after being a fugitive until he achieved the prescription.
Months later and after taking refuge in the United States, Villavicencio promoted new complaints against Correa for alleged irregularities in oil contracts with China.
Two years later, a judge ordered his imprisonment for revealing secret information he allegedly obtained by hacking emails from the Correa government, with the aim of promoting an investigation into corruption in the oil sector. This time he took refuge in Lima, Peru, until his return to Ecuador in 2017.
His anti-correísta nerve led him to the National Assembly in 2021 and last June, after applying the "cross death", he announced his presidential candidacy to replace Lasso, but under the slogan of not giving anything to correísmo.
In the latest polls by the Cedatos institute for the presidential election, he was in second place with around 13% of the votes behind Luisa González (26.6%), a close friend of Correa.
In an interview with EFE in May after announcing his presidential aspiration, Villavicencio, who at the beginning identified himself as a moderate left and who currently claimed to be from the center, assured that he wanted to be president to "confront and defeat the mafias that have co-opted the State and bring society to its knees".
The candidate focused on "the political mafias that are linked to drug trafficking and criminal structures of illegal mining, and also corrupt structures in the public sector." Villavicencio affirmed that Ecuador needs a "brave government" and offered to dismantle the mafias "with the law and with arms."
"Ecuador is walking very quickly towards the generalized contamination of the economy. We have a criminal economy financed by drug trafficking, illegal mining and the resources of overpricing and bribery from corruption in the public sector," he lamented.
His murder leaves an electoral campaign that practically only revolved around the security crisis that Ecuador is going through, with the highest rates of violent deaths in its entire history (25.32 per 100,000 inhabitants), including other politicians, more blood stained and candidates.
