Who was Ecuador's assassinated presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio?

By Steven Grattan and Joshua Schneyer

(Reuters) - Fernando Villavicencio, the Ecuadorean presidential candidate gunned down in Quito on Wednesday, was no stranger to threats and intimidation from powerful figures in Ecuador.

Long before he entered this year's presidential race on an anti-corruption platform, Villavicencio built a name for himself rooting out graft, backroom deals and waste in the government and major industries of his resource-rich country.

Over the years, his scathing and meticulously documented corruption accusations – leveled first as a labor organizer and congressional aide and later as a journalist, lawmaker and presidential contender – targeted some of the biggest names in Ecuador's political and financial establishment.

Villavicencio unearthed evidence of bribery and underhanded campaign funding schemes during the administration of former President Rafael Correa, contributing to a criminal conviction for Correa himself, who has lived in Belgium since leaving office.

Villavicencio also denounced high-ranking executives in Ecuador's oil, mining and power industries – and even big foreign companies including Chinese oil behemoths, Brazilian engineering firms and global oil trading firms.

More recently, Villavicencio helped expose the growing presence of drug cartels in Ecuador, including Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel, which has contributed to an unprecedented crime wave rattling the country.

As recently as this week, Villavicencio told crowds that he was receiving death threats from cartel bosses. At one of his last campaign rallies, a video shows him calling them out.

"I'm not afraid," he bellowed. "Come and get me!"

Villavicencio was killed by a gunman after a campaign rally at a Quito-area school on Wednesday evening, just 11 days before election day. The murder is the first of a presidential candidate in Ecuador's history.

Ecuadorean authorities said an armed suspect at the scene was then killed in a shootout. That suspect and six others who have been detained are Colombian nationals, police say.

HAD BEEN IN EXILE

Last year, Villavicencio, whose head of brown hair made him look younger than his 59 years, said he had been targeted for assassination when his Quito home was attacked by gunfire.

Since 2010, Villavicencio had also spent various stints, some for years, in hiding or exile, at times taking refuge with Indigenous communities in Ecuador's Amazon region or in neighboring Peru.

A decade ago, a Reuters investigation based in part on confidential documents, contracts and emails obtained by Villavicencio showed how China's government and state oil giants came to control more than 90% of Ecuador's oil exports.

A year later, in 2014, Villavicencio went on the run to avoid imprisonment for alleged defamation of then-President Correa. Correa accused Villavicencio of espionage and hacking government emails.

Villavicencio came from a humble, small-town background and moved to Quito as a teen. At 18, he sparked outrage from authorities with a newspaper he founded called Prensa Obrera, or The Workers Press, focused on labor rights.

Villavicencio's muckraking journalism carried on well into later life. He wrote books about corruption and pollution linked to Ecuador's booming oil sector.

In 2017, he fled to Peru seeking political asylum, leaving behind his wife and two young children. He returned to Ecuador in 2018, when the charges of defamation and espionage against him were lifted.

He won a spot in the country's National Assembly in 2021 as an independent candidate and presided over a key government oversight committee, submitting investigative reports to federal prosecutors and President Guillermo Lasso.

One of them, the so-called "Petrochina Report," was the culmination of a decade of digging into how the country had allowed China to take control of so much of its oil exports in return for billions of dollars worth of government loans.

Villavicencio, who had worked at state oil company Petroecuador early in his career, alleged the loan deals were rife with corruption and damaged the country's finances.

Among his report's allegations: that Ecuador missed out on at least $5 billion in oil revenues as officials solicited bribes worth some $70 million from global oil trading firms.

Villavicencio served in the assembly until May, his tenure ending when embattled Lasso, facing corruption allegations, dissolved the legislature to avoid possible impeachment.

(Reporting by Steven Grattan in London and Joshua Schneyer in New York; Editing by Brad Haynes and Rosalba O'Brien)