A presidential candidate in Ecuador who had been outspoken about the link between organized crime and government officials was assassinated on Wednesday evening at a political rally in the capital, just days before an election that was expected to be dominated by concerns over drug-related violence.
The candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, a former journalist, was gunned down outside a high school in Quito after speaking to young supporters.
“When he stepped outside the door, he was met with gunfire,” said Carlos Figueroa, who worked for Mr. Villavicencio’s campaign and was at the rally. “There was nothing to be done, because they were shots to the head.”
Mr. Villavicencio, 59, was polling near the middle of an eight-person race. He was among the most vocal candidates on the issue of crime and state corruption.
It was the first assassination of a presidential candidate in Ecuador and came less than a month after the mayor of Manta, a port city, was shot to death during a public appearance. Ecuador, once a relatively safe nation, has been consumed by violence related to narco-trafficking in the last five years.
“Outraged and shocked by the assassination,” President Guillermo Lasso wrote on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, late Wednesday, blaming the death on “organized crime.”
The national prosecutor’s office said an hour later, on the same platform, that a suspect had been shot and apprehended amid crossfire with security forces, and had died shortly afterward.
This is terrible, I think this further hammers that they need to tackle corruption and organized crime.
As long as there is a demand for drugs like coke (and while the production remains illegal), countries like Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia will probably still see these issues. Look what happens when a candidate speaks out against corruption. Would you want to run in his place?
Demand is not the issue, criminalization is. Legalize, regulate and tax all drugs like a normal product to take the supply chain out of the hands of organized crime. Use part of the income of the taxes to treat addiction as a medical issue and not a criminal one.
Why are drugs even illegal in the first place? It’s not like drugs are a new thing. Recreative drug use has been common for millennia without it being criminalized and society functioned just fine. This whole war on drugs is just beyond stupid.
Why are drugs even illegal in the first place?
Here’s a great documentary which answers this question. It focuses on cannabis but I guess the reasons are similar for hard drugs: money, politics and racism.
Oh, I know why; the question was meant metaphorically.
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You’re 100% right but even in a country like Canada the money put into prevention for addiction of gambling or alcohol as two examples is so goddamn piss poor it’s a joke.
The underlying problem is we know the solution and you just stated it but it’s toothless when you halfass which is all we do.
Another win for the war on drugs.
Congratulations to drugs for another victory
At what point do people start rising up against these cartels? I’ve seen a video of some guys being scared shitless when they were stopped by armed civilians on some rural road in South America, only to be told that they were locals who were out to stop the cartels from robbing people on the road. I wonder when it gets to the point where that is a common occurrence?
It happened a couple of times. Sadly it usually results in the newly founded militia becoming the new cartel in the area.
Try to read about who is who in the myriad Guerrilla groups in Colombia. After decades of armed conflict the lines start to blur and it becomes impossible to distinguish what is a civilian self-defense groups and what is a criminal armed group. Violence begets violence, the psycho-social mechanism that endows the initiative to violence from a civilian group are the same that endows violence from a criminal cartel or from an ideological Guerrilla. You either squash them all and monopolize them (as in a government controlled monopoly of violence via regulated police and armed forces) or the conflict bubbles regularly for eternity.
It’s not even limited to just guerillas, vigilantes and narcos; the government, army, police, militias, private security etc all start to bleed over as well. In Myanmar some of the state approved border forces are former drug cartels, who even further back used to be communist guerillas, and even further back were ethnic militias. Sometimes they’ve been several of these at the same time, some even all of them at once.
I fell like the only way is to become a dictatorship like El Salvador, and then hope the person in power is actually trying to make the country a better place.
Be right back, I’m going to read up on the latest of El Salvador.
Edit: Bukele has good intentions, but it’s clear that he justifies the means with the ends, including jailing non-criminal dissenters, removing elected officials, and ignoring the supreme court to do it. Only 30% of the 70,000 jailed (nearly 1% of the country’s population) have gang ties according to human rights groups.
At the same time, Bukele has a 90% popularity rating. The people clearly want this. I just wonder how and when the falsely imprisoned might be freed.
Mr. Villavicencio, 59, was polling near the middle of an eight-person race.
Well if his party is allowed to replace him, and they replace him with someone with a similar message they will probably get a huge bump in numbers at least.
