
Fernando Alcibiades Villavicencio Valencia (11 October 1963-9 August 2023) was an Ecuadorian Movimiento Construye politician who was assassinated while running for president on an anti-corruption and anti-crime platform in 2023.
Biography[]
Fernando Alcibiades Villavicencio Valencia was born in Alausi, Ecuador in 1963, and he cofounded the left-wing indigenist Pachakutik party in 1995 before working as a journalist, Petroecuador employee, trade unionist, pizzeria owner, political advisor, and Coalition Movement politician (after leaving Pachakutik in 2017). Villavicencio was sentenced to 18 months in prison for libel in 2010 after accusing President Rafael Correa of ordering an armed incursion at a hospital during a police revolt, and this arrest resulted in his prevention from running for parliament in 2017. He was elected to the National Assembly in 2021, surviving a September 2022 assassination attempt at his home in Quito. In 2023, he ran for President of Ecuador as the candidate of the center-left Movimiento Construye, and he was controversial for his obstruction of Guillermo Lasso's impeachment process, while notably claiming that Ecuador was a "narco-state" and vowing to fight against organized crime. At 6:20 PM on 9 August 2023, he was shot in the head while entering a vehicle shortly after concluding a campaign rally at a Quito school, and he died of his wounds shortly after. A suspect in his assassination was killed in a shootout; Villavicencio was assassinated shortly after making a report to the Justice Ministry about an unknown oil business, amid a time of increasing gang violence in the country, and just two weeks before the general election. A criminal group called "Los Lobos" claimed responsibility for the assassination.