Just days before an election whose main topic is the country's fall into violence and crime, Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was shot and killed as he exited a campaign event in Quito.

Social media videos depict Villavicencio, a former journalist who was outspoken about the alleged connections between organized crime and politics, encircled by supporters and being accompanied by security guards to a waiting vehicle when gunshots ring out, and people begin to scream and take cover.

President Guillermo Lasso was "outraged and shocked by the assassination" and would convene a meeting of his security cabinet. "For his memory and his fight, I assure you that this crime will not remain unpunished," he stressed.

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The attorney general's office later said that one of the murder suspects had passed away due to wounds sustained in the ensuing gunfight, and six people had been detained in connection with the incident.

Galo Valencia, Villavicencio's uncle, spoke at the scene of the shooting and accused the government of failing to provide his nephew with adequate security. He also recalled how he initially mistook the bullets for fireworks fired by Villavicencio's fans until "we saw that there were wounded falling, blood, and injured people."

"What we witnessed was like a horror film. The death of my relative. I have no words for what's happening in the country. They just killed democracy," he said.

"What insecurity we live in … if a man who fought more than 20 years, the most likely to win the elections, is silenced. Is this the way to win elections?"

Ecuadorians prioritize addressing national security

The murder takes place in the midst of a dramatic increase in violent crime in the small South American nation, where rival drug trafficking gangs are responsible for murders inside prisons, and the murder rate more than doubled between 2020 and 2022.

In the early elections scheduled for August 20th, Villavicencio was one of eight candidates vying for president. In a survey, more than half of Ecuadorians stated that addressing the nation's insecurity issue is their top priority.

Villavicencio's rival candidates expressed regret, as Otto Sonnenholzner wrote on Twitter: "Our deepest condolences and deep solidarity with the loved ones of Fernando Villavicencio. May God keep him in his glory. Our country has gotten out of hand."

Nuestro más sentido pésame y profunda solidaridad con los seres queridos de Fernando Villavicencio. Qué Dios lo guarde en su gloria.

Nuestro país se ha ido de las manos.

— Otto Sonnenholzner (@ottosonnenh) August 9, 2023

Villavicencio, 59, said just days before his murder on national television that the jailed Choneros gang leader known as "Alias Fito" had repeatedly threatened him with death and told him not to divulge his name.

He was also was one of the most vocal opponents of corruption, particularly from 2007 to 2017 under the administration of former president Rafael Correa.

Villavicencio fled to indigenous territory in Ecuador in 2014, and in 2017 Peru granted him asylumm and spent some time in the Amazonian Kichwa hamlet of Sarayaku. Patricia Gualinga, the community's leader, reacted to the news of his death by saying, "I am crying and very distressed because he was a personal friend."

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