2023-08-15 00:07:41
A local politician was assassinated in Ecuador on Monday, less than a week after the murder of one of the presidential favorites on August 20, his party announced.
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Pedro Briones, member of the Citizen Revolution correist party and one of the leaders of this formation in the province of Esmeraldas, was killed on Monday, announced on the social network X (formerly Twitter) Luisa Gonzalez, one of the main presidential candidates.
“My solidarity with the family of comrade Pedro Briones, new victim of violence”, commented on the social network X Ms. Gonzalez, close to the former left-wing president Rafael Correa (2007-2017).
“Ecuador is going through its bloodiest period,” she added, criticizing “the total abandonment of an inept government” and a “state taken over by the mafias”.
Neither the police nor the government have so far confirmed the incident.
According to the Ecuadorian press, citing a local police source, the victim was shot dead at his home in the town of San Mateo by two men who came on a motorcycle and who were able to flee.
Mr. Briones was a local leader of former socialist President Rafael Correa’s Citizen Revolution movement (2007-2017) in the coastal province of Esmeraldas, which borders Colombia.
This assassination comes less than a week after the murder, on August 9 in the capital Quito, of one of the presidential favorites, the centrist Fernando Villavicencio.
Mr. Villavicencio, a 59-year-old journalist on a crusade against corruption in his country, was in second place in the polls on the presidential voting intentions, when he was shot dead as he left an electoral meeting in the capital, Quito.
One of his main feats as a journalist was to have sent former President Correa (2007-2017) to the dock thanks to one of his investigations. Mr. Correa, a refugee in Belgium, was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison in this case.
Most of Ecuador has since been under a state of emergency, and President Guillermo Lasso has blamed organized crime for the killing.
Six Colombians were arrested as part of the investigation, and one was killed shortly after the attack by the candidate’s bodyguards.
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