They murdered another mayor in less than a week

2024-04-19 17:18:32

QUITO. Days following a similar incident, the mayor of the mining city of Portovelo, in southern Ecuador, was murdered on Friday following being shot several times while carrying out activities in the center of that city, the police reported.

The perpetrators of the crime would be two subjects who were traveling on a motorcycle that was abandoned and located following a police deployment, said the report published on the social network X, formerly Twitter. The motives for the attack were not disclosed.

The event occurred in the midst of a state of internal armed conflict that the government established since January and that allows the deployment of the Armed Forces and the police throughout the country for surveillance and security. This is the second murder of a mayor in less than a week and the third so far this year.

In a statement published on its official X account, the Association of Municipalities of Ecuador mourned the death of Jorge Maldonado, mayor of the city of Portovelo, 570 kilometers south of the capital in the province of El Oro. the voice of the 221 municipalities of the country,” the message stated. “We demand from the competent authorities a prompt and exhaustive investigation to bring those responsible to justice.”

Murdered mayor

On Wednesday, the mayor of the mining town of Ponce Enríquez, José Sánchez, was also shot dead. Portovelo, like Ponce Enríquez, is a city with great gold wealth in its subsoil.

A month ago Brigitte García, a young mayor of a coastal city in the province of Manabí, was murdered along with a companion.

In the last three years, Ecuador has been shaken by an unstoppable criminal spiral that turned the country into one of the most violent in the world, with a rate that closed last year at more than 40 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants and a growing number of kidnappings. , assaults and other crimes.

In July 2023, Agustín Intriago, mayor of the port city of Manta, died in a shooting attack and in May of that year, the mayor of the town of Durán, Luis Chonillo, was unharmed in an attack in which three people died.

The murders of authorities add to the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio that shocked Ecuador on August 9, 2023, when he was leaving a political event in the north of Quito.

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