Brigitte García, just 27 years old,
the youngest mayor of Ecuador
, was
murdered
this Sunday along with one of her collaborators, as confirmed by the police, in what is a new chapter in the wave of political violence, in the midst of a state of exception decreed by the Ecuadorian government.
The mayor of the coastal city of San Vicente and her communications assistant Jairo Loor were found inside a vehicle without vital signs and with
injuries from gunshot wounds
, indicated the local police report reproduced by the AP agency.
The double crime would have occurred in the early morning.
García, from the Citizen Revolution movement —
of former President Rafael Correa
(2007-2017) — had
assumed office in May
.
“Today
Brigitte is no longer here
.
I am 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 Manabí police commander, Colonel Emerson Ubidia, assured the press that the mayor
had not requested police protection
, so she did not have a security device.
He said he did not know if she had received threats.
The police chief commented that after an
alert from relatives
, units began the search and found the vehicle parked
on a beach in that city
.
The victims were shot inside the car, he said.
The Ecuadorian government's repudiation of another political crime
The Government of Ecuador expressed this Sunday its
condemnation of the murder
and offered to do everything possible to find those responsible for this crime.
"We are working with the State Attorney General's Office and we have ordered the National Police of Ecuador to carry out all actions that guarantee
immediacy in the investigation
, in order to find the
material and intellectual authors
" of the crime, the Ministries of Government (Politics) and the Interior.
For his part, the executive director of the Association of Municipalities of Ecuador, Homero Castanier, told AP that at least “
35 mayors have been victims of threats
,” and regretted that risk studies regarding requests for protection take up to six months. .
“It cannot be that our mayors are exposed to these attacks and
nothing is done
,” he stated.
It is not the first murder of an authority or political figure in the midst of the
violence that has overwhelmed Ecuador
in recent years.
In July 2023, the mayor of Manta,
Agustín Intriago
, was murdered while touring a construction site.
While in August of that year, the murder of
presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio
at the exit of a political event in Quito shocked the country shortly before the elections.
In January , the government of President
Daniel Noboa declared a state of emergency
and armed internal conflict after the escape
from a Guayaquil prison of a drug trafficking boss
—Adolfo Macías—which unleashed a series of violent acts such as the seizure by subjects armed with a television channel while broadcasting live.
D.S.