Ecuador will hold six Colombian men for at least a month as the country investigates 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 held Friday in the capital convention center, 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 that 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.
They face as many as 26 years in prison each.
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 has 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. Investigators said they found 64 shell casings at the scene of the shooting.
Villavicencio, 59, had said he was threatened by affiliates of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, one of a number of international organized 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.
With almost 640 kilometers 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 hub for the smuggling of cocaine from neighboring Colombia and Peru.
A lack of opportunities and decades of conflict have produced some of the world's most renowned hired guns.
Colombian assassins – known as sicarios – made headlines for decades in their own country for waves of high-profile killings. Perhaps the most notable case was the killing of presidential candidate and former leftist rebel Carlos Pizarro, who was shot in 1990 by an assassin aboard a commercial flight.
In 1999, Ecuadorian presidential candidate Jamie Hurtado was assassinated, orders that allegedly came from Colombian paramilitaries. In 2021, a pack of Colombian ex-soldiers were found to be involved in the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moise, thrusting the Caribbean nation into chaos.
Colombian soldiers can be highly trained, including by the U.S. military. When they leave the service, they often struggle to make ends meet and make up a pool of recruits for companies seeking anything from consultants to bodyguards. Teams have guarded Middle Eastern oil pipelines and have fought against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
In Ecuador, 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.
The Ecuador National Police tallied 3,568 violent deaths in the first six months of this year, far more than the 2,042 reported during the same period in 2022. That year ended with 4,600 violent deaths, the country's highest in history and double the total in 2021.
Villavicencio had received at least three death threats before the shooting and reported them to authorities, resulting in one detention.
Lasso declared three days of national mourning and a state of emergency that involves deploying additional military personnel throughout the country.
Villavicencio was an independent journalist who investigated corruption in previous governments before entering politics as an anti-graft campaigner. He was one of the country's most critical voices of the 2007-17 government of President Rafael Correa.
Villavicencio, who was married and is survived by five children, filed many judicial complaints against high-ranking members of the Correa government, including against the ex-president himself. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for defamation over his criticisms of Correa, and fled to Indigenous territory in Ecuador, later receiving asylum in neighboring Peru.
One of Villavicencio's investigations led to criminal proceedings and an eight-year prison sentence on corruption charges against Correa. The former president, who moved to Belgium in 2017, was sentenced in absentia in April 2020.
Authorities said that at least nine others were wounded in Wednesday's shooting, including a congressional candidate.
