A seventh Colombian suspected in the August assassination of Ecuador presidential candidate and anti-corruption crusader Fernando Villavicencio has died in prison, officials said Saturday.
The prisons authority said in a statement that the man killed in Quito’s El Inca prison — like the six who died Friday in a prison in port city Guayaquil — was “linked” to Villavicencio’s murder.
It offered no details of the latest death or of how the victim was connected to the politician’s assassination.
The authority said earlier that Friday’s killings occurred amid “riots” at the Guayas 1 prison in Guayaquil, a frequent scene of bloody clashes between drug trafficking gangs.
The incidents took place just a week before a key election run-off in Ecuador.
Right-wing President Guillermo Lasso, who was on a private trip to New York on Friday and was due in South Korea on Saturday for an official visit, called off his trip to immediately return to Ecuador.
The SNAI prisons authority said Friday that the deceased in the Guayaquil prison were Colombians accused in the August 9 murder of Villavicencio as the 59-year-old journalist was leaving a rally in Quito days before the first-round vote.
The public prosecutor’s office said that its agents, along with police and the military, were “executing security protocols… in light of the disturbance that occurred Friday.”
It added in a statement on X that “in the coming hours, specialized military personnel will carry out the first raids and reconnaissance of Cellblock 7, where the incidents originated, to take control of the situation.”
Authorities have provided no further details about the killings.
The October 15 election run-off will be between a close associate of former socialist president Rafael Correa, of whom Villavicencio was a fierce opponent, and a right-wing candidate.
Key election issue
The assassination of Villavicencio, a centrist who had been polling in second place, rocked Ecuador days ahead of the August 20 national elections in which corruption and the country’s declining security situation were major themes.
Six Colombians with long criminal records were arrested shortly after, while a seventh was killed at the scene of the crime.
Villavicencio had carried out scores of investigations, including exposing a vast graft network which led to former president Correa being sentenced to eight years in prison.
Correa fled the country to avoid jail time and has been living in exile in Belgium for six years.
Villavicencio had drawn the ire of gangs and drug traffickers with his reputation for speaking out against the cartels, many of which operate out of prisons across Ecuador.
Guayas 1, which houses some 6,800 inmates, is one of five facilities that make up a large prison complex in Guayaquil, a key port city that has become one of the country’s increasingly bloody centers of a turf war between rival drug-trafficking gangs.
More than 430 inmates have died violently since 2021, dozens of them dismembered and incinerated amid disputes between rival gangs.
In late August, dozens of guards were taken hostage at several prisons around the country before eventually being released.
On Ecuador’s streets, homicides have quadrupled between 2018 and 2022, climbing to a record 26 per 100,000 inhabitants.
That rate could climb to as high as 40 this year, according to experts.
Ecuador was once a peaceful haven nestled between the world’s largest cocaine producers — Colombia and Peru.
However, the war on drugs in other South American nations displaced drug cartels to Ecuador, which has large Pacific ports with laxer controls, widespread corruption, and a dollarized economy.
The prisons crisis has become a key point of debate ahead of the second round election on October 15, between leftist lawyer Luisa Gonzalez and 35-year-old upstart Daniel Noboa.
Noboa has proposed leasing ships to hold the country’s most violent prisoners offshore.
