Usually, boarding a plane isn’t my favorite thing, but this time there’s a calm that settles in. I’ll dodge the 46-degree chill on Thursday, the kind of weather that makes you feel you’re drowning in the cold. And so it happened. The forecast for Southern Europe looks hopeful, even as the journey crawls through the vastness of Mexico City. It pleases me to roll down the taxi window and take in the 27 degrees announced for today while traveling from Benito Juárez Airport to the hotel. A wish for rain, that rare, welcome spectacle, hangs in the air and, mercifully, it arrives — precisely at a quarter past four as planned.
There are moments when I feel as though I’ve stepped into another world, not because of distant volcanoes or the shadows of violence, but because the air feels breathable, suitable for everyday life. The fact that this city ranks among the most uninhabitable on the planet highlights how far the local environment has drifted from comfort. Still, there’s a sense of familiarity that eases the first steps. That same comfort also helps avoid the long passport queues, a privilege that feels shared with travelers from the United States. A border guard explains that a quick scan of the passport in the machine is enough, just like home. When the hosts arrive, exhaustion loosens its grip and a rush of relief and happiness takes over, bright as the sun coming through a taxi window.
Stay until 10 pm — that’s your passport to avoiding jet lag. While searching for a Spanish-language channel, the CNÑ news stream comes up, and the first item that catches the eye is striking: eight tons of cocaine seized in Rotterdam, all traced back to Ecuador. Eight tons. This, two days after a presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, was shot dead. The two stories together sketch a stark image of the challenges facing parts of Latin America, where drug trafficking wields outsized influence and can push societies toward crisis.
The broader issue seems clear: Latin America faces deeper trouble. The six people detained for the murder of the candidate, linked to the Construye Movement, are said to be Colombian nationals. Yet speculation points to the Nuevo Jalisco cartel or the Sinaloa cartel as possible behind the assassination, a concern López Obrador has publicly urged caution about. The pattern is obvious to many observers: organized crime appears to weave through national life, a continuous thread across the subcontinent.
Villavicencio stood out as a journalist renowned for tenacious investigations into political corruption and crime in Ecuador’s media landscape. He argued that crime and politics feed one another. His work linked corruption in oil administration — he once led the Oil Workers’ Union Federation — with corruption in Turkey, drawing on the digital edition of Focus Ecuador and his role in Ecuador’s National Assembly Oversight Commission. He described what he called the political mafia, especially in telecommunications, where organized crime thrives only with political complicity.
In an interview this year, a figure close to Indigenous leaders suggested that drug trafficking took root in Ecuador around 2007 when the Correa government shut down the Manta base, a joint U.S.–Ecuadorian facility. The base’s closure, they argued, benefited the FARC financially. Villavicencio, a clearly leftist voice, recalled that the shutdown helped the FARC — a point he linked to the broader funding networks of the cartels. He described Latin America as the victim of a collusion between political power and crime, where parties and leaders are sometimes financed by drug trafficking. Reportings about the president’s son added to a broader pattern of troubling signs across the region.
Villavicencio showed courage without relying on violence. He operated within public security channels, rejecting the recruitment of special forces or mercenaries. He pushed for a government that would take a bold, principled stand. His strategy was to threaten the removal of the “hydra” heads, those behind the political mafia, while keeping a firm belief in democratic institutions. His warnings were clear: if democracy and the rule of law do not prevail, the nation and the wider world could confront consequences beyond imagination. His resolve and advocacy, even in the face of threatening dark days, stood as a testament to the power of principled journalism and civic courage in the face of entrenched corruption and crime.