He murder of the young Ecuadorian councilor Diana Carnero, riddled with gunshots in the middle of a public street, has joined a long list of politicians, prosecutors and judges who have lost their lives at the hands of the organized crime, with the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio as the best-known case of this wave of violence that plagues Ecuador.
Ram She was attacked on Wednesday afternoon by two people on a motorcycle who shot her directly in the head when she was filming and photographing the state of the streets in the canton (municipality) of Naranjal, where just a year ago she had become the youngest councilor. of the history of this jurisdiction, upon assuming office at the age of 29.
The councilor, who was active in the Citizen revolutionthe party that leads the former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017), she was a civil engineer, studying a master’s degree in Public Administration and had founded in 2016 an academic remedial center for young people seeking to enter university.
Carnero’s story is repeated with numerous authorities at all levels, whose lives have been taken by the criminal gangs that operate in Ecuador practically without distinguishing positions or ideologies, especially on the country’s coast, key for the criminal gangs that control the routes. of drug trafficking and who use Ecuadorian ports and the coast to send large quantities of cocaine to Europe and North America.
A posthumously elected mayor
The crime of the Correísta councilor occurred a few days after one year of the murder of Omar Menéndez, candidate for mayor of the coastal municipality of Puerto López for the Citizen Revolution in the local elections of February 2023.
Menéndez, who posthumously won the election the next day with 46.22% of the votes, was gunned down on February 4 in a commercial area of the municipality.
Within the framework of that same electoral campaign, lawyer Julio César Farachio, candidate for mayor of the coastal city of Salinas for the leftist Unidad Popular movement, was also murdered while carrying out a proselytizing event where he was left lying in the middle of a pool of blood.
The wave of political violence grew within the framework of the extraordinary general elections with the murder of Rider Sánchez, candidate for assembly member for Esmeraldas of the Actuemos alliance, led by former vice president Otto Sonnenholzner.
Intriago and Villavicencio, the most popular faces
It continued with the notorious murder of the mayor of the city of Manta, Agustín Intriago, one of the most popular in the country, re-elected with 61.25% of the votes, who was also shot during a tour he was taking through the streets of the city. in which a young soccer player also died.
A few weeks later, on August 9, came the crime against Villavicencio that went around the world when the moment of the murder by a group of Colombian hitmen was captured on video, in a case that has yet to be clarified, since one died in the scene and the rest were allegedly murdered in prison.
The murder of Villavicencio focused for the first time international attention on the phenomenon of violence that had already occurred months before in the country, and which continued days later with the crime against Pedro Briones, a local leader close to Correism murdered in Esmeraldas.
In October it was the turn of Charbel Rouhana, councilor of the canton of Yaguachi, shot to death a few hours after a massacre occurred in that town in the province of Guayas where ten people were murdered, presumably due to a confrontation between two criminal gangs.
Chonillo, the surviving mayor
Very close to joining this black list was Luis Chonillo, mayor of Durán, one of the municipalities of the metropolitan area of Guayaquil, who in May survived an attack in which two of his bodyguards and one other person died, which led him to spend time in hiding and dispatch electronically.
However, the same fate did not befall Miguel Santos, director of Terrenos de Durán, who at the beginning of August was murdered by three armed people, and in September the same thing happened with councilor Bolívar Vera. The former mayor of Durán Mariana Mendieta was also kidnapped for three days that month of October.
Along with politicians, magistrates have also been the target of attacks in the last year, such as prosecutors Leonardo Palacios and Édgar Escobar, shot in Durán and Guayaquil, respectively; and Judge Nelson Yánez, in Lagro Agrio; while the attorney general, Diana Salazar, reported in June that she had received death threats.
On January 11, prosecutor César Suárez, a judge who had become popular for investigating cases of corruption in public hospitals and who also handled the case of the takeover of the TC Televisión channel by an armed group, was also murdered in Guayaquil. of the episodes that led President Daniel Noboa to declare the “internal armed conflict” against organized crime.
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Likewise, Santiago Loza, director of the El Inca prison in Quito, was shot in December 2022 and the directors of the women’s prisons in Esmeraldas and Guayaquil also suffered similar attacks in March 2023 where they managed to escape alive.