AFP Quito
Quito
Updated Sunday, March 24, 2024-15:52
Elections Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio is assassinated
The mayor of a coastal town in Ecuador was shot dead, the police reported this Sunday, in the midst of a state of emergency declared in the country to
stop violence linked to drug trafficking
.
Brigitte García
, mayor of the San Vicente resort, in the province of Manabí (southwest), was murdered along with one of her officials.
During the early hours of the morning, "two people without vital signs, with gunshot wounds,
were identified inside a vehicle
," the police said on their X social network account.
The crime occurred in the midst of the
state of emergency
that has been in force in Ecuador since January, when an onslaught of drug trafficking occurred after the escape of the leader of the Los Choneros gang,
Adolfo Macías
, alias
Fito
, from the Guayaquil prison.
Then, President
Daniel Noboa
declared the country in an internal armed conflict and called around twenty drug organizations "terrorists" and "belligerents", deploying the Armed Forces to subdue them.
García, 27, was part of the Citizen Revolution movement, led by former socialist president
Rafael Correa
(2007-2017), who spoke out about what happened.
"If it is so hard for you,
I imagine how your families must be.
I have no words," the former president wrote in X.
For her part, former presidential candidate
Luisa González
, from the same party, stated: "In
shock
, no one is safe in Ecuador."
In August of last year, presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was shot as he left a meeting with supporters. He had reported
threats from the leader of a drug gang
.
Months earlier, the mayor of the coastal city of Manta (southwest), Agustín Intriago
, was also shot dead
.
In addition to politicians, prosecutors have also been victims of violence. The most recent case was the murder in Guayaquil of
César Suárez
, who was investigating the wife of escaped trafficker
Fito
.
Located in the middle of Colombia and Peru, the largest cocaine producers in the world, Ecuador has become a
logistics center
for shipping drugs to the United States and Europe.
Within the small nation, criminal gangs associated with Mexican and Colombian cartels compete to the death for trafficking routes and power in prisons, where
some 460 inmates have died
since 2021.
The homicide rate also skyrocketed in the country, once considered an island of peace. Between 2018 and 2023 the rate went from six to a record
46 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.