Ecuador’s youngest mayor and one of his collaborators were shot dead

Brigitte García, at just 27 years old, the youngest mayor of Ecuadorera murdered This Sunday he was joined by one of his collaborators, as confirmed by the police, in what is a new chapter in the wave of political violence, in the midst of the state of exception decreed by the Ecuadorian government.

The mayor of the coastal city of San Vicente and his communications assistant Jairo Loor were found inside a vehicle without vital signs and with gunshot wounds, indicates the local police report reproduced by the AP agency. The double crime apparently occurred early in the morning.

García, of the Citizen Revolution movement –of former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017)—, there was he took up the position in May.

“Today Brigitte is no longer here. I’m broken. “I can’t believe it,” Correa wrote on the social network X, formerly Twitter.

Loor, for his part, was the communications director of the municipality of San Vicente.

The authorities have not yet commented on the possible motive and the alleged perpetrators of this event.

The police commander of Manabí, Colonel Emerson Ubidia, assured the press that the mayor he had not requested police protection, so it didn’t have a safety device. He said he didn’t know if she had received threats.

The police chief commented that after a family alertOfficers started searches and found the parked vehicle on a beach in that city. The victims were killed inside the car, he said.

The Ecuadorian government’s repudiation of another political crime

The Government of Ecuador expressed its opinion this Sunday repudiation of the murder and offered to do everything possible to find those responsible for this crime.

“We are collaborating with the State Attorney General and have ordered the National Police of Ecuador to carry out all actions that guarantee immediacy in researchto find the material and intellectual authors“of crime”, the Ministries of Government (Politics) and Interior underlined in a joint statement.

For his part, the executive director of the Association of Municipalities of Ecuador, Homero Castanier, told AP that at least “35 mayors were victims of threats“, and regrets that risk studies for protection claims take up to six months.

“It cannot be that our mayors are exposed to these attacks and do nothing“, he has declared.

This is not the first assassination of an authority or political figure in the midst of violence engulfing Ecuador in the last few years. In July 2023, the mayor of Manta, Agostino Intriagohe was murdered while visiting a construction site.

While in August of that year the murder of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio at the end of a political event in Quito that shocked the country shortly before the elections.

The president’s government Daniel Noboa declared a state of emergency in January and internal armed conflict after fescape from a Guayaquil prison of a drug trafficking boss —Adolfo Macías—who unleashed a series of violent acts such as the takeover by armed individuals of a television channel while it was broadcasting live.