Three bullets to the head ended a presidential campaign, sending a South American nation and parts of Washington D.C. reeling. Fernando Villavicencio, a charismatic Ecuadorian politician, had been rising in the polls in the August 2023 snap elections by promising to take on the corrupting influence of violent, organized drug cartels. Less than two weeks before the election, as the candidate walked among a cheering crowd towards his car at a campaign event, an assassin shot him dead.
The brazen killing rocked Ecuador and brought international attention to the nation’s election. Villavicencio's supporters quickly blamed leftist Rafael Correa, president from 2007 to 2017, and his party for the candidate’s assassination, without evidence.
Then, the U.S. government got involved: First, the State Department announced a multimillion-dollar reward for information leading to those who planned the killing, and later, the FBI sent a team of agents to investigate the assassination.
Now, leaked private messages said to be sent by Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar, and reviewed by Drop Site News and The Intercept Brasil, reveal why the U.S. invested so many resources to investigate the candidate’s assassination: according to the messages, Villavicencio was a U.S. government informant. And Salazar, who was in close contact with the U.S. ambassador, helped shape a public narrative that the leftist party was to blame for the killing—a maneuver that successfully kept the Correaistas from returning to power and dramatically accelerated the Ecuadorian state's staggering descent.
The sensitive revelation is one of many that comes from the series of leaked chats between a former Ecuadorian assemblymember and an account he says was Salazar.
Drop Site is the first English-language outlet to obtain complete access to the explosive chat records that reveal the inner workings of a politically motivated attack on the leading leftist political party, all with the blessing of the U.S.
Some of the messages have been reported on by the Ecuadorian media, which has buried the story. The foreign press has largely ignored the leaks, which provide a rare and intimate look into an example of the underhanded, U.S.-backed right-wing playbook. This playbook has, over the last decade, duped much of the media, promoted reactionary movements and anti-political sentiments, rolled back social gains, and wreaked political havoc in Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, and beyond. Former president Donald Trump has also flirted with it, by attempting to use the U.S. Justice Department to go after political adversaries.
The Salazar messages are now the subject of an investigation by Salazar's colleagues and she is currently facing impeachment for “breach of duties” within the National Assembly, a process primarily led by the left-wing political party. In May, a Florida-based criminal attorney, representing an Ecuadorian man implicated in one of Salazar’s investigations, wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department, claiming that the messages “violate several federal laws” in the U.S. The attorney recommended the U.S. blacklist Salazar for revealing “highly sensitive and confidential information” from U.S. law enforcement agencies.
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