Fernando Villavicencio, the center-right Ecuadorian presidential candidate shot dead while out campaigning on August 9th, apparently by Colombian hitmen, will still appear on election ballots on Sunday, and could win the contest.
Villavicencio was shot in the head three times during the assassination, a bloody affair that saw nine others injured and one of the politician’s assailants killed in a police shootout. It could have been substantially worse if a grenade, thrown among Villavicencio’s supporters by the assassins during the fracas, had not failed to detonate.
If the dead man, who ran on a platform of taking down drug gangs and political corruption, wins the election, his place in the presidential palace will be taken by Christian Zurita, a close friend.
Zurita expects that the South American country’s criminal underworld will attempt to kill him as well: “They killed Fernando, and I am the closest person to Fernando,” he said. “If they went for him, they are coming for me.”
The journalist has been campaigning in a bulletproof vest, and sent his family into hiding as a precaution.
“We now have a collapsed state,” he says of his county, where homicides were up by 80 percent in the first half of 2023.
