The mayor of a small mining town in Ecuador was shot dead on Wednesday, just days before a national referendum on whether to take tougher measures against crime, authorities said.
Jose Sanchez, mayor of Camilo Ponce Enriquez canton in the southern province of Azuay, “was shot and killed,” the mayor’s office wrote on Facebook.
Sanchez, 52, was exercising at night accompanied by his bodyguards when gunmen opened fire, police wrote on X.
Photo: AFP
He is the fourth Ecuadoran mayor to be assassinated in a year and the second in less than a month.
Last month, the mayor of coastal San Vicente was found shot to death along with the municipality’s communications director, Jairo Loor.
Millions of Ecuadorans cast ballots in a referendum on Sunday to decide whether to green-light stricter measures against organized crime in a country gripped by bloody gang wars.
Expressing solidarity with the family and friends of Sanchez, the Ecuadoran Ministry of the Interior wrote on X: “This tragic event reinforces our tireless commitment to combat serious criminal acts.”
Once a bastion of peace situated between major cocaine producers, Ecuador has been plunged into crisis after years of expansion by the transnational cartels that use its ports to ship the drug to the US and Europe.
Prosecutors, journalists and police are also among the victims of organized crime linked to Mexican and Colombian cartels.
In January, Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa declared that Ecuador was in a state of “internal armed conflict” against about 20 criminal groups.
That came after a spasm of violence sparked by the prison escape of a major drug lord, who has yet to be recaptured.
Noboa imposed a state of emergency and deployed soldiers to retake control of the country’s prisons, which had become the nerve center — and battleground — for gangs linked to Mexican and Colombian cartels.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
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