Six Colombians arrested in slaying of presidential candidate

QUITO, Ecuador (AP):

Ecuador will hold six Colombian men for at least a month as the country probes their involvement in the slaying of a presidential candidate whose life’s work was fighting crime and corruption, the national prosecutor’s office said Friday.

A public ceremony to mourn Fernando Villavicencio was being held Friday in the capital convention centre, while a separate funeral service was being held for relatives. “People need to know that his family’s in danger and we can’t go to such a big event,” the victim’s daughter, Tamia Villavicencio, told reporters outside the cemetery.

The Colombian men were arrested Wednesday in connection with Villavicencio’s killing in the capital, Quito, earlier in the day. The men, whose nationalities were announced late Thursday, will be detained for at least 30 days in the investigation, but will almost certainly be held for months or years as the case plays out.

Villavicencio was not a front-runner in the race, but his assassination in broad daylight less than two weeks before a special presidential election shocked the country and demonstrated how surging crime will challenge Ecuador’s next leader. Violence linked to gangs and cartels have claimed thousands of lives in the past few years.

The suspects were captured hiding in a house in Quito, according to an arrest report reviewed by The Associated Press. Law enforcement officers seized four shotguns, a 5.56-mm rifle, ammunition and three grenades, as well as a vehicle and one motorcycle, the report said.

Ecuador’s Interior Minister Juan Zapata described the killing as a “political crime of a terrorist nature” aimed at sabotaging the August 20 election.

The police report does not say whether the Colombians are members of a criminal group. But Zapata said the suspects were linked to organised crime.

Villavicencio, 59, had said he was threatened by affiliates of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, one of a slew of international organised crime groups that now operate in Ecuador. He said his campaign represented a threat to such groups.

Armed Colombian groups have long used the porous border with Ecuador to hide from the authorities in a region scarred by both cocaine trafficking and deadly political battles between Colombian factions and state forces.

“The Ecuadorian people are crying, and Ecuador is mortally wounded,” said Patricio Zuquilanda, Villavicencio’s campaign adviser.

With almost 400 miles (640 kilometres) of Pacific coast, shipping ports and some key exports, Ecuador has been turned by international traffickers from a minor player in the drug business into a big regional hub for the smuggling of cocaine.

An intensifying struggle over power and territory since the pandemic has seen drug cartels battle among themselves and enlist local gangs and even recruit children, leaving Ecuadorians reeling from unprecedented violence.

“Ecuador has the geographical misfortune of being sandwiched between Colombia and Peru, the two largest cocaine producers in the world, and underlying it all is a certain degree of institutional weakness in the judiciary, police and military,” said Cynthia Arnson, a distinguished fellow at the Washington-based Wilson Center and an expert in Latin America.