Dramatic Video From Widow of Slain Candidate Rocks Presidential Race in Ecuador, Confirms Drop Site Investigation

The story below could play a major role in shaping the outcome of the Ecuadorian election on Sunday, where the left-leaning party of Rafael Correa is challenging the incumbent right-wing President Daniel Noboa. If you want more coverage of Latin American politics, let us know by upgrading to a paid subscription or using this link to make a tax-deductible contribution.

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Source: Verónica Sarauz on X.

A stunning allegation has rocked the Ecuadorian presidential election, with the widow of a slain presidential candidate confirming the accuracy of an explosive investigation published last year by Drop Site News.

The article published evidence that the nation’s attorney general, a close ally of the United States, had withheld accurate information about the assassination, and pushed forward disinformation, in an effort to frame the political party of former president Rafael Correa for the murder.

Ecuador’s major media outlets joined the prosecutor, Diana Salazar, in rejecting the claims, but a new video posted to X by Verónica Sarauz, the widow of Fernando Villavicencio, dramatically confirmed the allegations, with Sarauz saying that she had been pressured by Salazar and now-President Daniel Noboa to point the finger at Correa despite the identity of the true assassins being known at the time.

The election is set for Sunday, April 13, with Noboa facing a runoff against Luisa González, the nominee of Correa’s party. Correa is in exile; Noboa has recently faced allegations of complicity in drug trafficking. To shore up American support, Noboa traveled to Mar-a-Lago for some face time with President Donald Trump, offered to allow U.S. troops to station in Ecuador once again, and has been cozying up to Trump ally Erik Prince.

The brief photo-op with Noboa was pricey for the people of Ecuador. The government inked a lobbying deal with former Republican Sen. David Vitter and his firm Mercury Public Affairs in early March, agreeing to pay $165,000 of Ecuadorian public funds to “facilitate a high-level phone call as a precursor to an official visit between the Heads of States of Ecuador and the United States,” according to a foreign agent registration filing made by the Embassy of Ecuador. That photo has become central to Noboa’s campaign.

Last year, Drop Site News and Intercept Brasil—which is not affiliated with the U.S. version—published an investigation based on hundreds of leaked messages that allegedly came from the Ecuadorian attorney general, Salazar. Among the many revelations from the leaked chats was that Salazar was using the power of her office to launch investigations into left-wing politicians allied with Correa, while delaying investigations into right-wing politicians, in order to help the right win elections. The chats also revealed that Villavicencio was a U.S. government informant.

The private chats from Salazar were sent to a former Ecuadorian national assemblymember, who then recorded them and provided them to Drop Site.

In August 2023, Villavicencio had been rising in the polls in the lead-up to that month’s snap elections. He had promised to eradicate corruption and drug trafficking. Just two weeks before the election, as Villavicencio walked among a cheering crowd, he was shot and killed by an assassin.

At first, supporters of Villavicencio—including his widow Sarauz—blamed the leftist Rafael Correa, who was president from 2007 to 2017, and his political party for the candidate’s assassination. That helped contribute to the electoral win of now-president and right-wing hardliner Daniel Noboa.

Now, Sarauz’s public video declaration says that Salazar, in coordination with Noboa, “pressured” her to publicly accuse Correa of her husband’s assassination. “It was all false. They vilely deceived me,” Sarauz says.

Sarauz’s explosive video comes less than a week before the second round of elections between Noboa and Luisa Gonzalez, the candidate representing Correa’s Revolución Ciudadana.

The accusation that Correa was responsible for Villavicencio’s killing came from leaked testimony from an Ecuadorian cooperating witness, who was collaborating with Salazar’s office. The witness claimed he was aware of the behind-the-scenes planning of Villavicencio’s assassination. Nearly a week before the Oct. 20 presidential runoff, Sarauz and Villavicencio’s replacement claimed they had received this leak that implicated Correa. However, the internal messages accessed by Drop Site and Intercept Brasil revealed that Salazar believed another group was behind the candidate’s killing: Los Lobos, a drug trafficking group.

The accusation against Correa rocked the left-wing Revolución Ciudadana’s campaign. Later, that witness came out publicly in a video on TikTok, to say he had been pressured to incriminate Correa.

“I want to denounce, to the country and the international community, an act of coverup between the attorney general Diana Salazar and the president Daniel Noboa, who are leaving complete impunity for the assassination of my husband Fernando Villavicencio,” Sarauz says in the video.

“I cannot and will not remain silent,” she added, saying that the assassination instead implicated drug traffickers, the Ecuadorian National Police, and money launderers in the country.

Salazar’s term is set to end soon. The race is extremely close, according to public polls.

P.S. Our original article was published in August 2024. You can read it here, but the top of it gives a flavor:

A U.S.-Linked Prosecutor Is Behind the Assault on Ecuador’s Social Democratic Movement

By José Olivares and Ryan Grim

Three bullets to the head ended a presidential campaign, sending a South American nation and parts of Washington D.C. reeling. Fernando Villavicencio, a charismatic Ecuadorian politician, had been rising in the polls in the August 2023 snap elections by promising to take on the corrupting influence of violent, organized drug cartels. Less than two weeks before the election, as the candidate walked among a cheering crowd towards his car at a campaign event, an assassin shot him dead.

The brazen killing rocked Ecuador and brought international attention to the nation’s election. Villavicencio's supporters quickly blamed leftist Rafael Correa, president from 2007 to 2017, and his party for the candidate’s assassination, without evidence.

Then, the U.S. government got involved: First, the State Department announced a multimillion-dollar reward for information leading to those who planned the killing, and later, the FBI sent a team of agents to investigate the assassination.

Now, leaked private messages said to be sent by Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar, and reviewed by Drop Site News and The Intercept Brasil, reveal why the U.S. invested so many resources to investigate the candidate’s assassination: according to the messages, Villavicencio was a U.S. government informant. And Salazar, who was in close contact with the U.S. ambassador, helped shape a public narrative that the leftist party was to blame for the killing—a maneuver that successfully kept the Correaistas from returning to power and dramatically accelerated the Ecuadorian state's staggering descent.

The sensitive revelation is one of many that comes from the series of leaked chats between a former Ecuadorian assemblymember and an account he says was Salazar.

Drop Site is the first English-language outlet to obtain complete access to the explosive chat records that reveal the inner workings of a politically motivated attack on the leading leftist political party, all with the blessing of the U.S.

Some of the messages have been reported on by the Ecuadorian media, which has buried the story. The foreign press has largely ignored the leaks, which provide a rare and intimate look into an example of the underhanded, U.S.-backed right-wing playbook. This playbook has, over the last decade, duped much of the media, promoted reactionary movements and anti-political sentiments, rolled back social gains, and wreaked political havoc in Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, and beyond. Former president Donald Trump has also flirted with it, by attempting to use the U.S. Justice Department to go after political adversaries.

The Salazar messages are now the subject of an investigation by Salazar's colleagues and she is currently facing impeachment for “breach of duties” within the National Assembly, a process primarily led by the left-wing political party. In May, a Florida-based criminal attorney, representing an Ecuadorian man implicated in one of Salazar’s investigations, wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department, claiming that the messages “violate several federal laws” in the U.S. The attorney recommended the U.S. blacklist Salazar for revealing “highly sensitive and confidential information” from U.S. law enforcement agencies.

Salazar and her attorney did not respond to a request for an interview nor to a detailed list of questions from Drop Site and The Intercept Brasil. She has never denied that the chats belong to her, but Salazar has called the entire ordeal a political circus, saying that it is an attempt to “contaminate” one of her major investigations. In March, when the assemblymember began releasing the chats, Salazar said on X, formerly known as Twitter: “I will remain focused on what is important, desperation knows no bounds. They will not distract our attention.”

Since being appointed in April 2019, Salazar has become one of Washington’s strongest allies in the country, with U.S. officials championing her as a crusader against corruption: the State Department presented her with an award; later this year, she’ll receive another award from the Woodrow Wilson Center; and Samantha Power, the USAID administrator, wrote a glowing profile of Salazar for TIME magazine. U.S. support is essential for a non-leftist with political aspirations. With the exception of Correa's presidency, the bilateral relations have historically been so tight that in 2000 Ecuador even went so far as to replace its own currency with the dollar.

Salazar has led a series of high-profile prosecutions to—as she has claimed—root out corruption in Ecuador, whipping up a national fever of anti-corruption and anti-political sentiments. Among the targets of investigations include the last three former presidents: Rafael Correa, Lenín Moreno, and Guillermo Lasso. (The impeachment case laid out by her political opponents accuses her of strategically accelerating cases against leftists while delaying others, including the ones implicating Lasso and Moreno, both right-wingers.)

Now, the tranche of hundreds of private messages show Salazar may have revealed sensitive information from the investigations, lending credence to allegations by Correistas that she engaged in a pattern of politically motivated actions, including aggressively pursuing cases against left-wing politicians while simultaneously delaying cases against more pro-U.S. right-wingers.

The messages, exchanged with Ronny Aleaga, a close confidante formerly of Correa’s party, call into question Salazar’s prosecutorial ethics and impartiality. The relationship between Aleaga and Salazar, ostensible political rivals, remains a source of mystery and intrigue in Ecuador. He told Drop Site their relationship was not romantic, but one of intimate confidence. Whatever the case, the messages, in which Salazar’s purported contact is registered as “Seño,” read as two people close to each other swapping political information, with the relationship going through twists and turns as Aleaga’s role in her investigations fluctuates. In an interview, Aleaga claimed he did not know why Salazar was sharing sensitive information regarding her investigations.

“I am also confused,” Aleaga told Drop Site. “If we were political adversaries, why was there this communication? I’m not sure.”

Aleaga provided Drop Site with conversations exchanged on an anonymous, private messaging platform that he recorded and saved. Drop Site and The Intercept Brasil also accessed other sensitive chats submitted as evidence in a separate criminal investigation. Overall, we reviewed over 1,500 private messages, spanning mostly from March 2023 to March of this year.

Diana Salazar, the current Ecuadorian Attorney General, in 2017. Photo by RODRIGO BUENDIA/AFP via Getty Images.

The release of these messages comes amid a defining moment in Ecuadorian history. Not long ago, Ecuador was in many ways the envy of Latin America. Today, economic freefall, gutted social spending, and political violence by increasingly brazen narco gangs are tanking the popularity of its right-wing president, heir to a billionaire banana fortune.

As narco violence lays bare the country's political unraveling, two figures are attempting to seize the crisis and define the moment: current president Daniel Noboa has chosen a hard-line, U.S.-backed militarized approach to combat organized crime and Salazar continues to disrupt the political establishment by pursuing investigations she says are related to corruption and drug trafficking.

The causes of such a dramatic reversal of national fortunes are inevitably multifaceted, but Ecuador's fate follows a specific pattern that has roiled many countries in the region in recent years—oftentimes with secretive support of the U.S. government, ultimately benefiting U.S. corporations and their local right-wing allies.

Among the allegations emerging from the leaked messages:

• Salazar may have delayed an investigation into businessmen linked to former right-wing president Guillermo Lasso to harm left-wing candidates during the 2023 snap elections.

• Salazar admitted the U.S. government did not want Correa's Movimiento Revolución Ciudadana, or Citizen Revolution Movement party (RC, by its acronym in Spanish) to win the 2023 elections. “They want RC’s head,” “Seño” wrote.

• Salazar warned Aleaga of a looming investigation into his alleged corruption, and encouraged him to flee Ecuador prior to a warrant for his arrest.

• Salazar claimed that assassinated presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was a U.S. government informant before encouraging Aleaga to become a cooperating witness for U.S. prosecutors.

• According to the messages, for months, Salazar knew that a criminal group was responsible for the Villavicencio murder. Despite knowing this, Salazar’s office ran with the theory that the murder was orchestrated by Rafael Correa and his allies, allowing accusations against Correa to circulate, potentially playing a deciding role in the tight 2023 snap elections.

• Salazar said she suspected the FBI deleted sensitive information from Villavicencio’s phone, during their investigation into the murder, before providing the contents to Salazar’s office, which "Seño" referred to as “procedural fraud.”

• Salazar may be using her office to punish a prominent former judge who acted against U.S. government law enforcement interests.

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