A presidential candidate in Ecuador who had been outspoken about the link between organised crime and government officials was assassinated on Wednesday evening at a political rally in the capital, just days before voting begins in an election that has been dominated by concerns over drug-related violence.

The candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, a former journalist, was gunned down outside a high school in Quito after speaking to young supporters. A suspect was killed in the melee that followed, and nine other people were shot, officials said.

“When he stepped outside the door, he was met with gunfire,” Carlos Figueroa, who worked for Villavicencio’s campaign and was at the rally, said of the candidate. “There was nothing to be done, because they were shots to the head.”

Villavicencio, 59, was polling near the middle of an eight-person race. He was among the most vocal candidates on the issue of crime and state corruption.

It was the first assassination of a presidential candidate in Ecuador and came less than a month after the mayor of Manta, a port city, was fatally shot during a public appearance. Ecuador, once a relatively safe nation, has been consumed by violence related to narco-trafficking in the past five years.

“Outraged and shocked by the assassination,” President Guillermo Lasso wrote on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, late on Wednesday, blaming the death on “organised crime”.

The national prosecutor’s office said on the same platform that a suspect had been shot and apprehended amid crossfire with security forces, and had died shortly afterwards. The office later said the authorities had carried out raids and detained six people in connection with the assassination.

The nine other people shot included two police officers and a candidate for a National Assembly seat, according to the prosecutor’s office. There was no immediate information about the condition of the nine people; it was unclear on late Wednesday night whether any of them had died.

The killing is a major blow to a nation that was already suffering deep economic, social and political upheaval.

“Electorally speaking, this year is the most violent in our history,” said Arianna Tanca, an Ecuadorean political scientist. “I think that what is going to change is the way we conceive of politics. I think that from now on it becomes a high-risk profession.”

Ecuador, on South America’s western edge, witnessed an extraordinary transformation between 2005 and 2015 as millions of people rose out of poverty, riding the wave of an oil boom whose profits were poured into education, health care and other social programmes.

But more recently, the country has been dominated by an increasingly powerful narco-trafficking industry. Foreign drug mafias have joined forces with local prison and street gangs, unleashing a wave of violence unlike anything in the country’s recent history.

New York Times News Service