Fernando Villavicencio, a candidate in the presidential general election to be held in Ecuador on August 20, denounced corruption and the growing influence of drug cartels. He paid for this with his life. The former investigative journalist was killed in the street on August 9, at the end of an election meeting. "My bulletproof vest is the people," said the man who refused to wear one out of bravery. The people couldn't protect him.
His murder is the latest and most dramatic manifestation of the spiral of violence in which Ecuador now seems to be trapped. Until a few years ago, this small country wedged between two major cocaine producers, Peru and Colombia, seemed to be spared of the crimes that litter the territories of this deadly industry.
New drug routes, which take advantage of the region's vast coastline, have called this fragile exception into question. Local gangs with links to Colombian, Mexican and Albanian organizations are now sowing terror. In July, Agustin Intriago, mayor of the country's second-largest port, Manta, and resolutely hostile to organized crime, was also assassinated, as was a candidate in the February municipal elections near the major port of Guayaquil, among many others.
Also in July, a massacre of 31 inmates was recorded in the same city's detention center. Ecuador's prisons, the scene of over five hundred homicides in three years, have become a frontline in the cartels' war against each other. The situation testifies to a worrying decline in the rule of law.
The execution of Villavicencio, who defended the creation of a high-security facility and an anti-mafia police force, is a reminder that, because of their weight and determination to impose themselves on their rivals at any cost, these drug cartels can no longer be considered a peripheral phenomenon in Ecuador. Through their violence and the corruption that they fuel, these criminal organizations pose a threat to the state itself.
Unfortunately, the weakening of Ecuador's democracy serves organized crime. The sterile quarrels that have agitated the country's political leaders in recent months have tied their hands. Particularly discredited in public opinion following accusations of embezzlement, the outgoing president, Guillermo Lasso, who is not standing for re-election, abruptly called a general election to prevent Parliament from voting on his possible impeachment.
Villavicencio had made a name for himself in the press by accusing President Rafael Correa of corruption, and was subsequently sentenced to prison in absentia after fleeing to Belgium. His tragic death is a wake-up call, first and foremost to guarantee institutional order and the holding of the general election.
But it will take much more than a state of emergency declared for the whole country, by a contested president who is on the way out, to respond effectively to this violent wave in which Ecuador could drown. A messenger has died, but the cause he defended and for which he gave his life must not be taken with him.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.