One year after the murder of Fernando Villavicencio in Ecuador: Seven dead suspects and no mastermind

The assassination of a presidential candidate on August 9, 2023, marked a point of no return in the crisis of violence facing Ecuador. After a few turbulent weeks following the murder of the mayor of a coastal city, a group of Colombian hitmen, camouflaged among people leaving a political rally, shot Fernando Villavicencio four times.

A year after Villavicencio’s assassination, 13 people have been arrested for their alleged involvement in the plot. Six of them were killed in the notorious Litoral prison in Guayaquil and another at the Inca prison in Quito. Of the survivors, five were convicted as perpetrators and accomplices in the murder on July 12 for hiring the assassins in Colombia, bringing them to Quito, and providing them with the vehicles they used on the day of the assassination. The Prosecutor’s Office identified Carlos Angulo, alias “Invisible,” who was being held in the Cotopaxi prison at the time of the assassination, as the mastermind behind the crime. Angulo directed the entire operation from prison, held videoconferences with those involved, and sent the order to the cell phone of Johan “Ito” Castillo, the hitman he brought from the outskirts of Cali to Quito to carry out the assassination.

Laura “La Flaca” Castillo executed the orders that came out of the maximum-security prison in Cotopaxi. Along with Angulo, she was sentenced to the maximum penalty of 34 years in prison. The other three defendants received 12 years and fines as accomplices. But the process to find out who ordered the crime and what the motivation behind it was continues to drag on, without conclusions and under a confidentiality order imposed by the Prosecutor’s Office. For Amanda and Tamia Villavicencio, daughters of the candidate, there is something amiss in the judicial process.

The Prosecutor’s Office maintains an open investigation into the identity of the ultimate mastermind of the crime, but the Villavicencio family faces restrictions on access to information about the case. “Recently, the deputy prosecutor informed us that we will not be given the file number or copies of the requested reports, and that a double layer of confidentiality has been placed on the investigation,” says Amanda.

During the trial, the court heard the testimony of a protected witness, Laura Castillo’s partner, who described how the logistics were organized before the murder. He was offered a role in the conspiracy, but did not accept; a few days after the crime, one of those involved told him that they had been paid $200,000 and it had been ordered by “someone from [former president Rafael] Correa’s government.” That version of events does not convince Villaviencio’s family. “We are afraid that the Prosecutor’s Office will only go for that hypothesis. Although our father denounced acts of corruption against Correa’s government, he also denounced many other spheres of power, he questioned many mafias,” says Tamia.

It was precisely his opposition to Correa that made Villavicencio a well-known figure in Ecuador. One of his journalistic investigations uncovered a bribery scheme that ended in a trial against Correa and a dozen of his closest collaborators, who were sentenced for corruption. Villavicencio always managed to obtain privileged information about irregular contracts in strategic areas of the state apparatus and became an uncomfortable character for many politicians.

In one of the last interviews he gave, on the day of his assassination, Villavicencio criticized the role of the authorities in the fight against organized crime. He stated that “the police know where the lairs of criminals, drug traffickers, illegal mining, white-collar criminals are,” and promised that one of the first things he would do if he became president would be to purge the security forces. He had also denounced, in previous days, threats from Fito, one of the most dangerous criminals in the country who escaped from prison in January of this year. Villavicencio received a warning from the organized crime leader: “If I continue mentioning Fito’s name and mentioning Los Choneros [his gang] they will break me,” he said.

At every rally in which he participated the candidate received threats. That is why the police officer in charge of his security detail, Captain Cristián Cevallos, had on several occasions requested tactical equipment, vehicles, and automatic weapons to reinforce Villavicencio’s security. Seven days before the murder, Cevallos made a new request but received no response from the police authorities. In addition, not enough agents were assigned to the candidate, according to normal procedure. This information was revealed as part of an investigation carried out by a congressional commission to determine who was politically responsible.

The report concluded the assassination was a political crime due to Villavicencio’s investigations into organized crime. However, the majority of the commission, composed of assembly members from various parties, approved a parallel report presented by a legislator from the ruling party, which held former president Guillermo Lasso, the Ministry of Interior, and the police responsible, discarding the hypothesis involving other organized crime figures.

“We are also orphans of the state,” Amanda points out. “We have realized that the country is an orphan of justice,” adds Tamia. The current signs of progress in the investigation do not provide them with any certainty that the authorities will identify those responsible for their father’s murder. They continue to harbor doubts about the possible omission of others responsible within the state machinery that facilitated the crime, such as SNAI, the government entity in charge of prisons, which had Angulo in custody.

“Who is responsible for that prisoner having fiber optic internet in his cell? Who failed in the custody of the other assassins killed in the prisons? What happened to those responsible for the shortcomings in his security?” they ask. “My father taught us that one swallow does not make a summer, and although he always sought the truth, we are determined to follow his legacy,” they conclude.

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