Ecuador Thousands of soldiers enter the Ecuadorian prison where the head of a criminal gang that threatened the assassinated Fernando Villavicencio is

Some 4,000 soldiers and police officers from Ecuador entered the jail on Saturday where the leader of the most powerful criminal gang in the country is being held and whom assassinated presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio accused of having threatened him, authorities reported.

The uniformed men entered the Guayaquil Zonal Deprivation Center Number 8 (southwestern Ecuador) at dawn, heavily armed and in armored military vehicles, where José Adolfo Macías, head of the criminal group “Los Choneros”, remains.

In images shared on social networks by the public force, a fat and bearded man appears. The SNAI prison authority confirmed to AFP that it is “Fito”, detained there since 2011. In one photograph he appears in front with his hands above his head and in others lying on the ground with his arms tied and in his underwear, together dozens of prisoners.

According to the SNAI, the operation “was carried out (…) with the aim of intervening in the minimum, medium and maximum security pavilions” of the penitentiary, as provided for by a state of exception in the country’s prisons that began at the end of July after a massacre.

The name “Fito” became media in Ecuador since Wednesday, after the shooting murder of the center presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio in Quito, who was second in the intention to vote according to a poll. The 59-year-old politician had denounced a week ago that the gang leader had threatened to kill him. One of the warnings, he said, came to him through a political ally in the coastal province of Manabí, where the town of Chone where the gang was born is located.

A “Fito emissary” contacted him, Villavicencio explained. It was “to tell him that if I keep (…) mentioning Los Choneros, they are going to break (murder) me,” he told the Vis a Vis program. “Fito” was sentenced to 34 years in prison for organized crime, drug trafficking and murder.

A former journalist and congressman, Villavicencio became a nuisance to criminal gangs and drug traffickers for his investigations. The authorities have not clarified who paid the hit men who shot him. Six Colombians have been detained in the case, while a seventh died in a crossfire with the candidate’s guards.

President Guillermo Lasso limited himself to saying that Villavicencio was a victim of organized crime. Prisons became the center of drug operations in Ecuador. Since 2021, more than 430 inmates have died violently, dozens of them dismembered and cremated amid disputes between rival gangs.