Saving the Fatherland: the death of Fernando Villavicencio

Rarely have I felt so strongly that I was in another world, neither because of distant volcanoes nor because of the history of bullet-filled events. It’s about breathing at a temperature suitable for simple animal life. The fact that this is in one of the most uninhabitable cities on the planet shows how frustrating the Spanish habitat has become. So you feel comfortable from the very first moment. Of course, this familiarity also helped us not to wait in the long queue of foreigners at passport control. It seems that this is a privilege we share with the Yankees. A border guard kindly tells me that all you have to do is scan your passport in the machine. Just like at home. When my hosts arrive, despite my exhaustion, I cannot suppress my exuberant joy.

Stay ’til 10 pm, that’s your password if you want to avoid jet lag. That’s why I put the news while searching for the Spanish American channel CNÑ. The first reference I read in the queues impresses me. 8 tons of cocaine originating from Ecuador were seized in Rotterdam. eight tons! This comes two days after he was shot dead. Fernando Villavicencio, he is a candidate for the presidential election of the Andean country. The two reports together give us an idea of ​​the dire situation in Latin America, the danger of some of its countries becoming States that are strongly conditioned by drug trafficking.

The problem is Latin America. I confirm this when I learn that the six people arrested as financially responsible for the murder of the presidential candidate by the Construye Movement are Colombian nationals. However, what is said in the surrounding news is that the Nuevo Jalisco cartel or the Sinaloa cartel was behind this assassination. so much the same Lopez Obrador He had to go out to ask for caution about these early doubts. They could be, and eventually crime could be attributed to the Albanian mafia, but there’s no doubt that organized crime has spread as a continuum across the subcontinent.

This is what Villavicencio, a journalist known for conducting vigorous and bold investigations into political corruption and crime in the Ecuadorian media, denounced. Both, because his thesis was that they must go together. There is no organized crime without political complicity. That was the key to his speech and campaign. For this reason, he investigated both corruption in the oil administration -he was the leader of the Oil Workers’ Union Federation- and corruption in Turkey, both from the digital press of the Focus Ecuadro newspaper and from his seat in the Ecuadorian National Assembly Oversight Commission. telecommunications areas, which he calls the “political mafia,” where organized crime cannot thrive without complicity.

A man close to Indigenous leaders argued in an interview with CNÑ in May of this year that the existence of drug trafficking in Ecuador began in 2007 when the Correa government liquidated the Manta base, a joint US-Ecuadorian facility. Of course the base has caused a lot of resistance and the São Paulo forum has called for the base to be closed. Villavicencio, who is clearly a leftist, recalled that the shutdown benefited the FARC, which was decisive in paying the financing. In fact, Villavicencio called the FARC the armed wing of the cartels. Thus, he spoke generally of Latin America as the victim of a “collusion” of political power and crime. He actually pointed to parties and leaders financed by drug trafficking. The news about Peter’s son is another sign of a phenomenon that has devastated us.

Villavicencio used courage, not violence. Absolutely refined, he resorted to the public security services and refused to use special forces or mercenaries. He desired a government that was brave, not lukewarm or collaborative. With the only effective thing, he threatened to decapitate the hydra, implying the bosses of what he called the political mafia. It happened today. He had been receiving death threats for some time, but despised them for continuing his political campaign. He said he wanted to save the “homeland” from illegitimate hands. The more the violence that these vast lands are subjected to, the more we are oppressed by their courage. If democracy and the civilizing principle of the State are not saved here, if the Homeland is not saved, the world will run into problems that it cannot even imagine.