Slaying of candidate rocks Ecuador

Violence seen gaining power

BOGOTÁ — The 12 shots fired on Wednesday evening, killing an Ecuadorian presidential candidate as he exited a campaign event, marked a dramatic turning point for a nation that a few years ago seemed an island of security in a violent region.

A video of the moments just before the killing of the candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, began circulating online even before his death had been confirmed. And for many Ecuadorians, those shots echoed with a bleak message: Their nation was forever changed.

“I feel that it represents a total loss of control for the government,” said Ingrid Ríos, a political scientist in the city of Guayaquil, “and for the citizens, as well.”

Ecuador, a country of 18 million on South America’s western coast, has survived authoritarian governments, financial crises, mass protests, and at least one presidential kidnapping. It has never, however, been shaken by the kind of drug-related warfare that has plagued neighboring Colombia, unleashing violence that has killed thousands, corroded democracy, and turned citizens against one another. Until now.

Hours after the killing, President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency, suspending some civil liberties, he said, to help him deal with growing crime.

And on Thursday afternoon, Ecuador’s interior minister, Juan Zapata, said that six suspects arrested in connection with Villavicencio’s killing were all Colombian, adding a new dimension to the storyline.

In the past five years, the narco-trafficking industry has gained power in Ecuador, as foreign drug mafias have joined forces with local gangs. They transformed entire swaths of the country, extorting businesses, recruiting young people, infiltrating the government, and killing those who investigate them.

The similarities to the problems that plagued Colombia in the 1980s and ’90s, as narcotrafficking groups assumed control of broad parts of the country and infiltrated the government, have become almost impossible for Ecuadorians to ignore.

On Thursday, some compared Villavicencio’s killing to that of Luis Carlos Galán, a Colombian presidential candidate gunned down on the campaign trail in 1989. Like Villavicencio, Galán was a harsh critic of the illegal drug industry.

Galán’s death still reverberates in Colombia as a symbol of the dangers of speaking out against criminal power.

More broadly, Colombia is still grappling with the effects of drug trafficking, which continues to hold sway over the electoral process and is responsible for the deaths of thousands each year.