Veronica Sarauzthe wife of Fernando Villavicenciothe candidate for the Presidency of Ecuador who was assassinated last Wednesday, this Saturday blamed the State for the death of her husband due to lack of protection and correísmo.

“The State is directly responsible for the murder of my husbandFernando Villavicencio,” said Sarauz at a press conference in Quito, who according to the candidate’s close family had been separated from him for six years.

Sarauz assured that the “State has to give many answers about what happened” and denounced a lack of protection measures against the one who was still her husband, who was shot several times as he left a rally at a Quito school on Wednesday in the late.

“I don’t want to think that they sold my husband to be infamously murdered“, conjectured the Ecuadorian, who did not provide evidence about the complaints made against the State and against correísmo, of which Villavicencio had become his staunch enemy as a result of the complaints he filed against them.

“I want to tell correísmo (…) that all of them are responsible, if not directly or indirectly of my husband’s death, but it was in this government that my husband died and it is the one that has to give explanations,” argued Sarauz, who arrived at the press conference wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet and flanked by a security member wearing rifle.

Correa denies involvement in the murder

The ex-president Rafael Correa (2007-2017) has repeatedly denied emphatically having anything to do with the murderfor which six Colombians have been arrested for the moment, accused of being the alleged hit men who carried out the crime.

And there is still no clarity about who is behind the crime, but it is speculated that it could be one of the criminal gangs that operate in the country and that the candidate himself denounced direct threats days before his death, and specifically referred to “phyto“, identified by the authorities as the leader of “The Choneros“.

A seventh man, also a Colombian national, died the same day of the attack as a result, according to the Ecuadorian authorities, of the injuries suffered from the exchange of shots between the attackers and the security personnel who were protecting Villavicencio.

Nine other people were also injured in the attack, of which five are in stable condition at the Women’s Clinic, where Villavicencio also arrived in a “fulminant” condition, which prevented health personnel from saving his life, according to a report. statement from that health center.

Villavicencio was one of the eight candidates registered to succeed the current president, the conservative Guillermo Lasso, in the extraordinary elections called for next Sunday, August 20, where the winner will complete the 2021-2025 period, interrupted by Lasso at dissolve the National Assembly (Parliament), with an opposition majority, when it was preparing to vote on his dismissal.

The journalist and former assemblyman was assassinated in the framework of an electoral campaign that, before the attack, already had as practically the only topic of discussion the security crisis affecting Ecuador for more than two years, with recurring murders and massacres that the government attributes to organized crime and drug trafficking.