Prison stormed after Ecuador assassination

Ecuador transferred a powerful gang leader, accused of threatening a presidential candidate before he was slain, to a maximum security prison via a massive military and police operation, officials said.

Early Saturday, 4,000 heavily armed agents entered Prison 8 in southwestern Guayaquil, where the head of the powerful Los Choneros criminal group, Jose Adolfo Macias, alias "Fito,"has been held since 2011.

President Guillermo Lasso said Fito was transferred to La Roca, a 150-strong maximum security prison that is part of the same penitentiary complex where he was being held.

Ecuador has been under a state of emergency since the shock assassination Wednesday of journalist-turned-politician Fernando Villavicencio.

The anti-graft crusader - up to then second in polls - was gunned down as he left a rally in the capital Quito. A week before the 59-year-old was killed, he had said Fito was threatening him.

On Saturday, Villavicencio's party announced that his running mate, Andrea Gonzalez, would take his place in the August 20 election.

Gonzalez, 36, is an environmental advocate who has fought for the protection of oceans, forests and mangroves.

Villavicencio's widow, Veronica Sarauz, blamed the state for her husband's death, accusing police of not adequately protecting him.

"This is a state crime because he was under the custody of the state through the police," she said on Saturday, also blaming supporters of ex-president Rafael Correa, who got eight years in 2020 after Villavicencio had investigated him for corruption.

The day before his assassination, Villavicencio had filed a complaint alleging irregularities in oil contracts negotiated during Correa's administration, estimating a loss to the country of US$9 billion (HK$70.2 billion).

Sarauz, who was escorted by police and wearing a bullet-proof vest and helmet, said she and her three children were "also in danger."

Lasso has blamed the murder on organized crime, with six Colombians arrested and a seventh killed in a shootout with bodyguards. Authorities have not said who hired and paid the hitmen.

Before his murder, Villavicencio said an "emissary" for Fito had told him to stop talking about the gang. "If I continue mentioning Los Choneros, they are going to break me," he said.

Villavicencio had drawn the ire of gangs and drug traffickers with his reputation for speaking out against cartels.

Since 2018, drug seizures and homicides have increased alarmingly in Ecuador, blamed widely on transnational organized crime groups.

Prisons have become the center of operations for drug trafficking.

More than 430 inmates have died violently since 2021, dozens of them dismembered and incinerated.

Fito, who had been sentenced to 34 years for organized crime, drug trafficking and murder, had controlled at least one cellblock in the prison he was removed from.