2023-10-07 05:42:00
Six Colombian detainees, charged with the August 9 assassination of centrist presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, were killed Friday during “unrest” in a prison in Guayaquil, in the southwest of the country, authorities announced.
Right-wing President Guillermo Lasso, traveling to New York and then expected in South Korea, announced on X (formerly Twitter) that he would return to Ecuador “in the coming hours” to face “the emergency”, and that he “immediately” convened a meeting of senior security officials.
“No complicity, no concealment. Here, the truth will be known,” he said.
Fernando Villavicencio, a 59-year-old former journalist and one of the favorites for the first round of the presidential election, was shot dead by a commando of hitmen after a campaign meeting in Quito, 11 days before the vote. Six Colombians with a serious criminal past were arrested in flagrante delicto, and another killed by the victim’s bodyguards. In total, around ten people were arrested during the ensuing investigation.
“The six people deprived of their liberty (PPL) who died” in the Guayas 1 prison in Guayaquil “are of Colombian nationality and were charged with the assassination of former presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio,” the administration said. prison in a press release.
Initially, the authorities provided few details about this killing. The prosecution had announced on .
Massacre
Guayas 1, which houses some 6,800 inmates, is one of five prisons in the immense Guayaquil penitentiary complex, where more than 430 inmates have died, sometimes dismembered or burned, since 2021. According to the Ecuadorian government, the deadly violence which regularly break out in prisons are due to struggles for influence between rival drug trafficking groups.
President Lasso decreed a state of emergency in prisons in July, which notably allows the army to be deployed there. This measure, taken following a particularly appalling massacre which left dozens dead in Guayas 1, was extended until the end of October.
According to local media, Ward 7 of the prison is controlled by the Los Aguilas group, one of several Ecuadorian criminal gangs linked to Colombian or Mexican drug cartels, such as those of Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generacion.
This six-fold murder comes a little more than a week before the second round of the presidential election, which will see Luisa Gonzalez, heir to former leader Rafael Correa, and the son of billionaire Daniel Noboa face off on October 15. Mr. Villavicencio’s replacement, Christian Zurita, also a former journalist, was eliminated in the first round.
Fernando Villavicencio was a fierce opponent of the former left-wing president Rafael Correa (2007-2017), whom he had sent to the dock thanks to the revelations of one of his journalistic investigations. A refugee in Belgium, Mr. Correa was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison for corruption.
Mr. Villavicencio’s widow and her relatives directly implicated – but without presenting evidence – the Correa camp, accusing it of having “links with criminal gangs”.
Once considered an island of peace in Latin America, Ecuador, located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest producers of cocaine, has been hit in recent years by an unprecedented wave of violence linked to organized crime and drug trafficking.
In this country of 16.9 million inhabitants, the homicide rate has exploded. It quadrupled between 2018 and 2022 to reach a record of 26 per 100,000 inhabitants. According to experts, this rate could rise to 40 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023.
07/10/2023 05:40:26 – Guayaquil (Ecuador) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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