Ecuador is fast becoming a narco state

Few political assassinations will have been as predictable as Fernando Villavicencio’s, the Ecuadorian presidential candidate and anti-corruption firebrand gunned down in Quito this week. 

The brutal murder took place in a country that in recent decades has been largely free of serious political violence, notwithstanding the ferocious inter-party struggles that have seen both coups and the persecution and exile of opponents. 

Yet Villavicencio, a fifty-nine-year-old former investigative journalist, did not just anticipate his demise — he repeatedly cited the death threats he was receiving from the drug traffickers he vowed to crack down on. And at times, he almost appeared to welcome the danger. 

Just last week, he name-checked the “Sinaloa cartel,” the ferocious Mexican criminal organization that has aligned itself with Ecuadorian street gangs as being the source of one of those threats. 

At the same time, he openly refused to wear a bullet-proof vest, saying he preferred to campaign in a “sweaty shirt,” while relying on the goodwill of his supporters for his safety. “I don’t need one. You’re a brave people and I’m as brave as you are,” he told one rally. “Let the drug lords come, let the hitmen come.”

There can be no doubting his courage, but the candidate may also have been reckless with his own personal safety. Because Villavicencio, who once described himself as a leftist but had more recently positioned himself on the center-right, had effectively declared war on some of the most violent drug trafficking groups in the world. 

Enabled by corrupt officials, the cocaine gangs have in the last couple of years bathed this South American backwater, once one of the most peaceful countries in the region, in blood.  

There have been horrific prison riots that claimed hundreds of lives and endemic gangland killings across the nation, but in particular around Guayaquil, the sweltering Pacific port through which dozens, possibly hundreds, of tons of cocaine pass each year on the way to street corners from London to Los Angeles. 

“The fact that they killed him in broad daylight, surrounded by police protection, just shows how the situation has spun out of control,” says Sebastian Hurtado, president of Quito-based political risk consultancy Prófitas. 

Ecuador actually cultivates minimal quantities of cocaine. But it is hemmed in by the world’s two largest producers, Colombia and Peru, and has become a major transit hub. 

Among his proposals, had he actually become president, Villavicencio wanted to build a new maximum-security prison to completely isolate the gang leaders, who have frequently continued to coordinate their criminal outfits’ operations even while being held in jail. 

And he had a shot, albeit a long one, of pulling it off. Ahead of the August 20 first-round presidential vote, polls showed Villavicencio on around 8 percent but rising quickly, possibly by enough to overtake the second-placed candidate, Otto Sonnenholzner, on around 15 percent, and squeeze his way into a run-off against Luisa González, the frontrunner and proxy of Villavicencio’s nemesis, the former left-wing populist president Rafael Correa.

Indeed, it was by confronting Correa, the leader who gave asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to provide a fig leaf for his own sustained assault on critical Ecuadorian journalists, that Villavicencio first shot to national fame a decade ago. 

The reward for that first expose of the brash young president’s alleged corruption was an eighteen-month jail sentence for Villavicencio for criminal defamation delivered by a court system under Correa’s thumb. 

The journalist initially sought asylum in neighboring Peru. But he eventually had the last laugh, after Correa was sentenced in 2020 to eight years in jail for graft following another of Villavicencio’s investigations. It is thanks to that pending jail term that the former president remains in exile in Belgium, his wife’s homeland. 

Yet that may not be the end of the story. The political shockwaves from Villavicencio’s slaying will take time to come into focus. It is possible that his killing will strengthen the drug traffickers in the way its perpetrators intended. But it is also feasible that the backlash will involve the comprehensive crackdown on the narco-violence that Villavicencio was campaigning for. 

If that happens, one of the most obvious political losers could be González and, more broadly, Correismo, including any chance of recapturing the judiciary and thus paving the way for a triumphant return of Correa himself. 

But in the meantime, Ecuador is now under a sixty-day national state of emergency, with the armed forces on the streets, resembling all too much the “narco-state” that the slain candidate warned of. 

The Andean nation must now confront that harsh new reality without one of its most powerful and eloquent voices for the rule of law and against the bloodletting and rampant corruption spawned by the cocaine trade.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.