Fernando Villavicencio, a former journalist who was standing as a presidential candidate, was killed in broad daylight this week in a Quito street.
He was campaigning on a tough-on-crime and anti-corruption platform.
With this assassination Ecuador reached a terrifying new low into violence and criminality.
Villavicencio was fatally shot as he was leaving a campaign rally at a school north of the capital city, 10 days before the first round of the presidential election. He was 59 years old.
Nine other people, including a candidate for the National Assembly and two police officers, were also injured in the attack.
In the 1980s and the 1990s Latin America was part of the global wave of democratisation. But in the past few years it has become part of the global retreat.
Populists from Mexico to Brazil have tested the strength of institutions. Nicaragua has entrenched its dictatorship. El Salvador has one in the making in Nayib Bukele. The Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala and Honduras have been increasingly influenced by corrupt and criminal actors.
The latest country to be dragged down is Ecuador.
Once known as the “isla de paz” – the island of peace, Ecuador has in recent years reported some of the highest homicide rates in the region.
Though Ecuador has no history of producing cocaine, nor its main ingredient coca, it is sandwiched between the two largest narcotics hotspots in the world – Peru and Colombia.
Ecuador has now become an integral part in the lucrative cocaine trafficking routes from South America to North America and Europe.
Violence has been most pronounced along the country’s Pacific coast as criminal groups battle to control and distribute illicit drugs.
The country has also lost control of its overcrowded prisons, which are often ruled by criminal gangs. The security forces have struggled to confront the gangs inside prisons, where it has often happened that inmates take control of branches of the prisons and run criminal networks from behind bars. Hundreds of inmates have been killed in brutal prison riots between rival gangs.
In July, the mayor of the port city of Manta, Agustin Intriago, was shot dead alongside Ariana Chancay, a young athlete he was talking with on the street.
Despite the killing, the election will still take place, despite a period of national mourning with some of the candidates even temporarily suspending their campaign.
All the candidates have pledged to rein in this escalation of violence.
A legislator in the National Assembly, Villavicencio had been outspoken about corruption and the violence caused by drug trafficking in the country.
In May, he told CNN that Ecuador had become a “narco state” as he proposed to lead a fight against what he called the “political mafia.
Opinion polls however had Villavicencio around the middle of the pack of the eight candidates, far behind the frontrunner Luisa Gonzalez.
President Lasso dissolved the opposition-led congress in May, paving the way for early elections. He had faced an impeachment vote over accusations from opposition legislators of embezzlement before he took office, which he denies.
Calls for his resignation had grown louder in recent months as the country was engulfed by a cost-of-living crisis and the deterioration of the security crisis.
But the deteriorating security and economic situation is now leading more Ecuadorians to leave the country, with statistics showing thousands making their way north through the treacherous Darien Gap in the hope of reaching the United States.
There are thousands of kilometres between Malta and Ecuador but in every country democracy is always at risk especially where the talons of organised crime reach deep and where the forces of law and order are not sufficient to cope with the demands made on them.
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