Fernando Villavicencio during a campaign rally in Ecuador in 2023. Courtesy
His campaign slogan was “It’s time for the brave”. Fernando Villavicencio, the Ecuadorian presidential candidate who was shot dead before a rally in Quito, thought he was a tough man. His proposals included building a “maximum security prison” to incarcerate the most dangerous criminals, militarizing ports to control drug trafficking, and creating an anti-mafia unit that would “with foreign support” go after “drug dealers”, kidnappers and all kinds of criminal structures”. He was a journalist by profession and a politician by conviction. But his proposals did not fully reach the Ecuadorian electorate: he was between fourth and fifth in the polls for the August 20 presidential elections, far from the favorite Lucía González, the candidate of former President Rafael Correa (2007-2017 ).
It was precisely his opposition to Correa that made him a recognized figure in Ecuador. One of his journalistic investigations uncovered a bribery scheme that cornered Rafael Correa and senior government officials. For this case, Correa received an eight-year prison sentence in April 2020 and now lives as a refugee in Belgium.
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In 2014, a court sentenced Villavicencio to 18 months in prison for insulting Correa after a complaint was made of alleged crimes against humanity in a military raid on a hospital. The journalist disobeyed the arrest warrant and fled to an indigenous town in the Amazon jungle. In 2016, a judge sentenced him to jail again for using hacked emails as part of an investigation into alleged corruption at Ecopetrol. Villavicencio then fled to Lima until Correa’s successor, Lenín Moreno, allowed him to return to the country in 2017.
Villavicencio considered himself to be on the left. Born 59 years ago in a rural town in inland Ecuador, he always remembered that his childhood was very poor. He was 13 years old when his family moved to Quito. In an interview with the newspaper El Universo, he said that during this phase he “worked during the day – peeling fish, shelled mussels, worked as a waiter or chair – and studied at night”. At the age of 17 he was already working as a presenter for a radio station dedicated to Latin American culture. He made his political debut in 1995 in the Pachakutik movement, a party with indigenous roots campaigning for the recognition of Ecuador as a plurinational nation.
Fernando Villavicencio greets his supporters during a rally. With kind approval
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Villavicencio resumed his political career in 2017 after returning from exile in Peru. In October 2020, he announced his candidacy for the National Assembly and won. He joined the control unit there and presented 24 reports that confronted him with both the government and his colleagues in the assembly. After all, her vote was key to avoiding the ousting of Guillermo Lasso by Parliament, which ended with the call for presidential elections to Parliament last May.
Subsequently, Villavicencio presented his candidacy, which was supported by the Construye and Gente Buena movements. He structured his campaign around fighting mafias and drug trafficking. Days ago, the candidate said he had been threatened with death by “one of the bosses of the Sinaloa cartel,” whom he called Fito. “This confirms that our campaign proposal seriously affects these criminal structures. “I’m not afraid of them,” he said at the time. This Wednesday he received three shots in the head.
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