A presidential candidate in Ecuador is gunned down days before the election. The president of Haiti is shot to death and his wife is seriously wounded when assassins storm their home.
High-ranking political leaders survive violent attacks in Argentina, Colombia, Brazil and Venezuela.
Running for public office in much of Latin America and the Caribbean can literally be a matter of life and death.
“Latin America’s democracies are quite new and fragile, and political violence represents an enormous threat,” said Benjamin Gedan, director of the Latin America Program at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank.
The latest political assassination to rock Latin America happened Wednesday when Fernando Villavicencio, a former journalist and anti-corruption presidential candidate in Ecuador, was gunned down less than two weeks before a special election.
Villavicencio, who was known for speaking out against drug cartels, was killed while getting into a white truck after a campaign rally in Quito. Six Colombian nationals have been arrested in connection with the shooting. Police did not say whether they were alleged members of a criminal gang, but Ecuador’s interior minister, Juan Zapata, said those arrested were linked to organized crime.
In Washington, the Biden administration said the FBI is assisting Ecuadorian authorities in their investigation.
Villavicencio’s assassination is a reflection of the security challenges across the region and, more recently, in Ecuador, which until a few years ago was a relatively safe and peaceful country, said Jason Marczak, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.
“This is unfortunately not new to the region,” Marczak said. “But the spate of attacks against presidential candidates and presidents themselves has increased in the last few years, partly due to the deteriorating security situation and the degree to which criminal elements have felt emboldened.”
Political violence has a long history in Latin America. “In Mexico, there’s a body count at every election,” Gedan said.
One of the most brazen assassinations occurred in Mexico nearly 30 years ago. Luis Donaldo Colosio, the ruling party’s candidate and the man widely assumed to be the country’s next president, was shot and killed while walking through a crowd of supporters in a working-class neighborhood in Tijuana in 1994.
A single gunman, factory worker Mario Aburto Martinez, was charged with the crime. But in echoes of the 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, conspiracy theories persist that Aburto did not act alone despite a government investigation and a confession from the gunman himself.
More:6 Colombians arrested in assassination of Ecuadorian presidential candidate
Why is there so much political violence in Latin America?
Political violence in Mexico and other Latin American countries can often be traced to high levels of polarization, extreme insecurity and organized crime, Gedan said.
Organized criminal groups typically exert control through corruption. “They are able to call up state institutions by buying off police chiefs and general and even the president,” Gedan said. “But they also resort to violence when necessary.”
In Ecuador, Villavicencio’s death deepened the sense of crisis around organized crime that has already claimed thousands of lives and underscored the challenge facing that country’s next leader.
A series of other attacks on political leaders over the past five years also has raised alarms.
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the vice president of Argentina, survived an assassination attempt last September when a man pointed a gun at her outside her home. The weapon failed to discharge. Former Brazilian President Bolsonaro was stabbed on the campaign trail in 2018. He survived but required emergency surgery on his liver.
Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated after gunmen stormed into his bedroom in Port-au-Prince in 2021. Authorities said dozens of people were involved in the killing, which they have described as a conspiracy involving Haitian officials and Colombian mercenaries.
Given the fragile nature of many Latin America’s democracies, any act of political violence rightfully provokes anxiety because it discourages potential leaders from getting involved in politics and undermines the authority of those who are elected, Gedan said.
“There’s a crisis of representation in Latin America, a sense that political elites simply don’t represent the majority of voters,” Gedan said. “Anytime an election process is not in the hands of voters, it undermines the legitimacy of a leader.”
There’s also the risk that political violence will become so normalized that it will be used not only by organized crime figures but by politicians against their rivals, Gedan said.
“It really is corrosive to democracy in this region,” he said.
Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on Twitter @mcollinsNEWS.
Contributing: The Associated Press
