Who was Fernando Villavicencio, the presidential candidate assassinated in Ecuador?

His campaign slogan was It is time for the brave. Fernando Villavicencio, the Ecuadorian presidential candidate shot dead outside a rally in Quito, considered himself a tough man. His proposals included building “a very high-security prison” to lock up the most dangerous criminals, militarizing the ports to control drug trafficking, and the creation of an Anti-Mafia Unit that, “with foreign support,” would persecute “drug traffickers.” , kidnappers and all kinds of criminal structure”. He was a journalist by profession and a politician by conviction. But his proposals did not fully penetrate the Ecuadorian electorate: he was between fourth and fifth in the polls for the presidential elections on August 20, far from the favorite, Lucía González, the candidate of former President Rafael Correa (2007-2017). .

It was precisely his opposition to Correa that made him a recognized figure in Ecuador. One of his journalistic investigations uncovered a bribery scheme that put Rafael Correa and high-ranking government officials on the ropes. For this case, Correa received eight years in prison in April 2020 and today lives as a refugee in Belgium.

In 2014, a court sentenced Villavicencio to 18 months in prison for insulting Correa, after a complaint of alleged crimes against humanity in a military raid on a hospital. The journalist did not comply with the arrest warrant and took refuge in an indigenous town in the Amazon jungle. In 2016, a judge again ordered his jailing for using hacked emails in an investigation into alleged corruption at Ecopetrol. Villavicencio then took refuge in Lima until 2017, when Correa’s successor, Lenín Moreno, allowed him to return to the country.

Villavicencio considered himself to be on the left. Born 59 years ago in a rural town in the interior of Ecuador, he used to remember that he lived a very poor childhood. He was 13 years old when his family moved to Quito. In an interview with the newspaper The universe, recounted that during that stage “he worked during the day – peeling fish, shells, as a waiter or chair – and studied at night.” At the age of 17, he was already working as a presenter on a radio dedicated to Latin American culture. His debut in politics was in 1995, in the Pachakutik Movement, a party with indigenous roots that campaigned for the recognition of Ecuador as a plurinational nation.

Villavicencio resumed his political career in 2017, upon his return from exile in Peru. In October 2020, he announced his candidacy for the National Assembly and won. He joined the Oversight Unit there and presented 24 reports that confronted him both with the Government and with his peers in the Assembly. Finally, his vote was key to avoiding the parliamentary dismissal of Guillermo Lasso, which ended last May with the call for parliamentary presidential elections.

Villavicencio then presented his candidacy, sponsored by the Construye and Gente Buena movements. He structured his campaign around the fight against mafias and drug trafficking. Days ago, the candidate said that he had received death threats from “one of the bosses of the Sinaloa Cartel,” whom he called phyto. “This confirms that our campaign proposal seriously affects these criminal structures. I’m not afraid of them, ”he said then. This Wednesday he received three shots to the head.

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