Who Was Ecuador’s Assassinated Presidential Candidate Fernando Villavicencio?

By Steven Grattan and Joshua Schneyer

(Reuters) – Fernando Villavicencio, the Ecuadorean presidential candidate gunned down in Quito on Wednesday, was no stranger to threats and intimidation from highly effective figures in Ecuador.

Lengthy earlier than he entered this 12 months’s presidential race on an anti-corruption platform, Villavicencio constructed a reputation for himself rooting out graft, backroom offers and waste within the authorities and main industries of his resource-rich nation.

Over time, his scathing and meticulously documented corruption accusations – leveled first as a labor organizer and congressional aide and later as a journalist, lawmaker and presidential contender – focused a number of the largest names in Ecuador’s political and monetary institution.

Villavicencio unearthed proof of bribery and underhanded marketing campaign funding schemes throughout the administration of former President Rafael Correa, contributing to a felony conviction for Correa himself, who has lived in Belgium since leaving workplace.

Villavicencio additionally denounced high-ranking executives in Ecuador’s oil, mining and energy industries – and even massive international firms together with Chinese language oil behemoths, Brazilian engineering companies and world oil buying and selling companies. 

Extra not too long ago, Villavicencio helped expose the rising presence of drug cartels in Ecuador, together with Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, which has contributed to an unprecedented crime wave rattling the nation.

As not too long ago as this week, Villavicencio informed crowds that he was receiving dying threats from cartel bosses. At certainly one of his final marketing campaign rallies, a video exhibits him calling them out.

“I am not afraid,” he bellowed. “Come and get me!” 

Villavicencio was killed by a gunman after a marketing campaign rally at a Quito-area faculty on Wednesday night, simply 11 days earlier than election day. The homicide is the primary of a presidential candidate in Ecuador’s historical past. 

Ecuadorean authorities mentioned an armed suspect on the scene was then killed in a shootout. That suspect and 6 others who’ve been detained are Colombian nationals, police say.

Final 12 months, Villavicencio, whose head of brown hair made him look youthful than his 59 years, mentioned he had been focused for assassination when his Quito dwelling was attacked by gunfire.

Since 2010, Villavicencio had additionally spent numerous stints, some for years, in hiding or exile, at occasions taking refuge with Indigenous communities in Ecuador’s Amazon area or in neighboring Peru.

A decade in the past, a Reuters investigation primarily based partly on confidential paperwork, contracts and emails obtained by Villavicencio confirmed how China’s authorities and state oil giants got here to manage greater than 90% of Ecuador’s oil exports.

A 12 months later, in 2014, Villavicencio went on the run to keep away from imprisonment for alleged defamation of then-President Correa. Correa accused Villavicencio of espionage and hacking authorities emails.

Villavicencio got here from a humble, small-town background and moved to Quito as a teen. At 18, he sparked outrage from authorities with a newspaper he based known as Prensa Obrera, or The Staff Press, centered on labor rights.

Villavicencio’s muckraking journalism carried on properly into later life. He wrote books about corruption and air pollution linked to Ecuador’s booming oil sector.

In 2017, he fled to Peru in search of political asylum, abandoning his spouse and two younger kids. He returned to Ecuador in 2018, when the fees of defamation and espionage in opposition to him had been lifted.

He gained a spot within the nation’s Nationwide Meeting in 2021 as an impartial candidate and presided over a key authorities oversight committee, submitting investigative stories to federal prosecutors and President Guillermo Lasso. 

Considered one of them, the so-called “Petrochina Report,” was the end result of a decade of digging into how the nation had allowed China to take management of a lot of its oil exports in return for billions of {dollars} price of presidency loans.

Villavicencio, who had labored at state oil firm Petroecuador early in his profession, alleged the mortgage offers had been rife with corruption and broken the nation’s funds. 

Amongst his report’s allegations: that Ecuador missed out on at the least $5 billion in oil revenues as officers solicited bribes price some $70 million from world oil buying and selling companies.

Villavicencio served within the meeting till Might, his tenure ending when embattled Lasso, dealing with corruption allegations, dissolved the legislature to keep away from doable impeachment.

(Reporting by Steven Grattan in London and Joshua Schneyer in New York; Enhancing by Brad Haynes and Rosalba O’Brien)

Copyright 2023 Thomson Reuters.