Six Accused of Murdering Ecuadorean Presidential Candidate Are Found Dead

The six Colombian males accused of murdering an Ecuadorean presidential candidate had been discovered lifeless in a jail within the port metropolis of Guayaquil on Friday, Ecuador’s jail authority mentioned in a press release.

The assassination of the candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, as he exited a marketing campaign occasion in August was a traumatic jolt for a nation that has been shaken by an more and more highly effective narco-trafficking business lately.

As overseas drug mafias have joined forces with native jail and avenue gangs they’ve remodeled whole swaths of the nation, extorting companies, recruiting younger individuals, infiltrating the federal government and killing those that examine them.

Mr. Villavicencio, who had labored as a journalist, activist and legislator, was polling close to the center of a gaggle of eight candidates when he was killed 11 days earlier than the primary spherical of the presidential election on Aug. 20. He was among the many most outspoken in regards to the hyperlinks between organized crime and the federal government.

The deaths of the six individuals accused within the assassination got here eight days earlier than a runoff election on Oct. 15, pitting a center-right businessman, Daniel Noboa, towards an institution leftist, Luisa González.

For a while, widespread hypothesis had advised that the Colombians had been weapons for rent, and that highly effective figures had ordered the assassination. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken mentioned final week that the United States was providing a reward of as much as $5 million for info resulting in the arrest or conviction of the masterminds, and as much as $1 million for info resulting in any gang chief accountable.

Upon studying of the deaths of the accused killers, President Guillermo Lasso mentioned he would return to Ecuador from New York and would maintain a right away assembly of the safety cupboard.

“Neither complicity nor cover-up,” he wrote on X, the location previously referred to as Twitter. “The truth will be known here.”

In its assertion, the jail authority vowed to “identify those intellectually responsible for the crime against the former candidate.”