The National Electoral Council (CNE) of Ecuador approved this Wednesday the candidacy of journalist Christian Zurita for the presidential elections on Sunday, replacing former deputy Fernando Villavicencio, assassinated last week.
The CNE plenary accepted the candidacy in favor of the Construye Movement, after verifying that Zurita met all the requirements and after rejecting a challenge filed by the Revolución Ciudadana party, linked to former President Rafael Correa (2007-2017).
The complaint alleged that Zurita was affiliated with another political party, the center-right Renovación Total (Reto), an annotation that the CNE declared invalid when verifying that it had been made with a signature different from that of the journalist.
Zurita’s candidacy was approved just over a day after the end of the campaign and a few hours after the start of voting for the extraordinary presidential and legislative elections, specifically for people detained in Ecuadorian prisons.
Although the votes are attributed to Zurita, 53, the photo of the journalist and former deputy Fernando Villavicencio will continue to appear on the ballots, since they were all printed before the murder.
The attack on Villavicencio took place at a rally held on August 9 in a crowded downtown area of Quito, where an unknown gunman shot the Ecuadorian presidential candidate.
At least nine people were injured in the attack, in which the suspect in the attack also died after a shootout with security guards, according to Ecuadorian authorities who also reported the arrest of six people.
The president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, declared a state of emergency.
Initially, the Construye Movement put Andrea González – who was vice president of Villavicencio in these elections – as its candidate, but fear of a possible rejection by the CNE led the party to choose Zurita.
The Construye Movement and Zurita himself accused the electoral body of being slow, stressing that the party ended up not being able to participate in a televised debate held on Sunday night.
“The CNE prevented participation in the presidential debate and now prohibits the promotion of our advertising in any media,” in addition to not having “offered support or treated the matter with the necessary exceptionality,” Zurita lamented on the X social network ( formerly Twitter).
Ecuador is experiencing the greatest insecurity crisis in the country’s history, which the authorities attribute to drug trafficking.
On Monday, Pedro Briones, a member of Revolución Ciudadana and one of the party’s leaders in the province of Esmeraldas, was assassinated in northwestern Ecuador.
According to the Ecuadorian press, citing a local police source, Briones was shot to death at his home in the city of San Mateo by two men who arrived on a motorcycle and managed to flee after the shots.
Source: TSF
