The murder of Ecuador’s youngest mayor spotlights how the country’s criminal groups violently target public officials who cannot be bought off.
Unidentified actors on March 23 kidnapped Brigitte García, the mayor of San Vicente county in Ecuador’s coastal province of Manabí, along with her communications director. The next day, authorities found their dead bodies in a rented car abandoned at a nearby beach.
Police are still investigating, but Ecuadorian media report that the victims’ belongings were found at the scene, ruling out a robbery.
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In a March 25 speech, Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa linked the deaths to organized crime.
“[These murders] remind us that the fight is not over, it has only just begun,” he said. “It’s also a clear warning that narco-terrorism exists within our public institutions and within our public officials.”
Just a day before García’s disappearance, armed men kidnapped National Assembly representative Lorena Rosado Sánchez and her husband, holding them hostage for three hours. The federal lawmaker blamed the attack on organized crime groups, writing on X, formerly Twitter, that her kidnapping was linked to her government work.
These incidents are just the latest in the long line of violent attacks against Ecuador’s public officials by organized crime groups trying to exert their will.
In February, armed men killed a councilwoman in Naranjal, a county in the province of Guayas. And just after Noboa declared war on the country’s gangs on January 9, presumed gang members gunned down an organized crime prosecutor working on several high-profile cases in Guayaquil, Guayas’ crime-ridden capital.
In 2023, gangs aggressively targeted judges, prosecutors, political candidates, and sitting officials. Their victims included the mayor of Manta, Agustín Intriago, who was accused of organized crime links, and presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, who investigated those links.
Many of the public officials who have survived such attacks live under siege.
Luis Chonillo, the mayor of Durán, another Guayas county beset by organized crime, survived an assassination attempt on the day of his inauguration on May 14, 2023. In the ten months since he has governed from safe houses, never sleeping in the same place for two nights in a row, and meeting with his cabinet and constituents virtually.
“Most of my department heads have to go to work like me, with helmets and bulletproof vests. They are not able to work normal hours. They cannot have a traceable routine,” Chonillo told InSight Crime.
Assassins killed one of Chonillos’ cabinet members in August last year and a Durán councilperson one month later, amid a war over territory between the Latin Kings and Chone Killers.
InSight Crime Analysis
Ecuador’s gangs use violence to sway public officials who refuse to be corrupted by bribes. They have been able to penetrate the country’s institutions partly because of the state’s failure to protect these officials.
Experts told InSight Crime that many officials who would otherwise refuse bribes cave when faced with the pressure of violence. The dilemma is known as “plata o plomo,” literally meaning “silver or lead,” figuratively referring to the choice between bribes or bullets.
“Sometimes officials are corrupted by easy money, but in a country like ours, they’re often trying to protect themselves and their families,” a Defense Ministry official who did not have permission to speak on the record told InSight Crime.
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Recently, text messages uncovered as part of a high-profile corruption investigation known as Metastasis revealed how drug trafficker Leandro Norero plotted violent attacks against uncooperative officials, including Villavicencio, who investigated Norero.
In one chat, Norero’s henchman tells him that another criminal is planning to “deliver the final blow” to Villavicencio. In response, Norero laughs, writing, “It will be me who gives him that.”
Norero was murdered in a prison massacre in October 2022, but less than a year later other criminal interests gunned down Villavicencio on the campaign trail. Authorities have yet to determine who ordered the hit on the presidential candidate, with key witnesses themselves being killed off in prison.
Such suspicious deaths have stacked up as Ecuador’s gangs gained near-complete control over the country’s prisons. Prison officials have little choice but to work for them, experts told InSight Crime.
“From the moment they arrive, gang members tell the guards, ‘I am so-and-so, I am with this gang … You either keep quiet or you die,’” a former prison official who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals told InSight Crime. “They know the gangsters have the power to do whatever they want.”
Judicial officials and police also face constant and credible threats against their lives.
In August 2023, the United Nations called on Ecuador to do more to protect judges and prosecutors, noting that “the threats appear to be especially pronounced for those who deal with organized crime.”
The government’s failure to protect its officials undermines its anti-corruption campaign and, thus, the wider struggle against gangs.
“There are government officials with authority who are with these groups,” Karen Lizbeth Veintimilla Pacheco, a private-sector security analyst specializing in fraud and citizen security, told InSight Crime. “At some point, they decided, ‘Enough, it’s better to join them, than have them kill me. At least, this way, the threats will stop.”
Feature Image: Christian Zurita of the Movimiento Construye party, who replaced slain presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, at the closing ceremony of his campaign.