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Ecuador is holding six Colombians in connection with the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, police have said, while the US is sending agents from the FBI to aid the investigation.
Villavicencio, a 59-year-old centrist former lawmaker and investigative journalist, was gunned down while leaving a campaign rally in Quito on Wednesday, deepening the country’s security crisis ahead of presidential and legislative elections due on August 20.
Police in Ecuador confirmed on Thursday afternoon that the suspects arrested immediately after the killing, as well as another who died in a shootout at that time, were Colombians.
Police have linked the killing with organised crime, which has mushroomed in Ecuador as the country is increasingly drawn into the activities of drug cartels from elsewhere in Latin America.
“The national police now have the first arrests of the alleged material authors of this abominable event and will employ all of their operative and investigative capacity to discover the motive of this crime and its intellectual authors,” interior minister Juan Zapata told journalists on Thursday.
The FBI is meanwhile assisting with the investigation into Villavicencio’s killing, a common practice with US allies in the region. Ecuador’s president Guillermo Lasso, who declared a state of emergency and a three-day period of national mourning, said he had requested assistance from US investigators and that they would arrive shortly.
It is not the first time that Colombian gunmen have been involved in the assassination of a politician overseas. Some 26 Colombians were members of a group that killed Haitian president Jovenel Moïse in Haiti in 2021.
Vigils took place across the country on Thursday for Villavicencio, who was campaigning on an anti-corruption platform and as a journalist led investigations into Rafael Correa, the leftist former president who governed Ecuador from 2007 to 2017 and was later convicted on corruption charges. Correa is living in exile in Belgium.
It is not yet clear what organised crime groups may have been involved in the killing. A video circulated on social media on Thursday in which men dressed in black uniforms and balaclavas and claiming to represent the Los Lobos — “the wolves” — drug gang, which is based in Ecuador, took responsibility for the murder. Another video appeared hours later, in which another group of men also claiming to be from Los Lobos, this time unmasked and dressed in white, denied involvement.
While two candidates — indigenous leader Yaku Pérez and law-and-order campaigner Jan Topic — announced a temporary suspension of their campaigns after the assassination. A presidential debate is scheduled to take place on Sunday.
Ecuador has been beset by a surge in violent crime in recent years as criminal organisations fought to consolidate drug-trafficking routes. Some 3,500 people have been killed so far this year, according to the police. Last year, 4,800 homicides were reported in the nation of 18mn people, almost double the rate of the year before and quadruple that of 2018, according to the interior ministry.
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