The Attorney General of Ecuador, Diana Salazar, who heads the investigation of the main corruption cases linked to drug trafficking in the Andean country, reaffirmed who is in the crosshairs of the criminals who murdered a presidential candidate.
“I think it is time for the country to know that when they murdered Fernando Villavicencio, the contract was not for one person, there were two of us, they murdered him and I think they are trying to fulfill that agreement,” said the head of the Public Ministry in a video published on Sunday on his YouTube channel.
Villavicencio was shot down in August 2023 when leaving a political event in the north of Quito. Seven of the 13 detained as alleged perpetrators were murdered in prison.
In the video he released, he assured that “I have lost my freedom,” because “I practically live under arrest,” he declared about the permanent military and police custody that accompanies him.
Salazar attends hearings and public events wearing a bulletproof vest and accompanied by heavily armed men, in addition to the fact that the prosecutor’s office is surrounded by barricades, police vehicles and military tanks.
“I cannot go to a public place, move freely through the streets and I believe that that is a right that we all have, however, it is the price we are paying for doing the right thing,” he stated.
The prosecutor also spoke about how, throughout these years, she has had to deal with the accusations, through social networks.
“We have to deal daily with political violence, through networks, and that generally happens to women, and even more so to black women, who have reached a position of high responsibility and decision,” she said.
And although he described that occupying this position in his country has been “very complex,” he believes that a chapter is being “written in the history of Ecuador.”
“It is the legacy that we are going to leave to our children tomorrow. Above all, to those black women, those indigenous women, those mestizo women, who dare to dream, that everything is possible,” added the prosecutor.
The prosecutor denied that she aspires to the presidency and revealed that once her six-year term ends in 2025, she will dedicate herself to her family.
Ecuador is immersed in a wave of violence that has escalated to levels never seen before, and that the authorities attribute to the presence of organized crime organizations linked to transnational drug trafficking cartels that dispute territories and routes for the transfer of drugs.
The prosecutor announced in December the investigation called “Metastasis”which is “an x-ray of how drug trafficking has taken over the State to, through ill-gotten money, operate in political and judicial instances and achieve impunity in some cases,” he said then.
From this investigation, which shook the state structures, others such as “Purga” and “Plaga” were derived, in which politicians, police officers, senior judicial officials, lawyers in free practice, an anti-narcotics chief and prison guards, among others, were accused.
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