The plot involves the assassination of a presidential candidate, a crime for which Rafael Correa was blamed through a viral campaign, Intercept and Drop Site reveal
Orlando Perez
Special for La Jornada
The newspaper La Jornada
Sunday, September 1, 2024, p. 20
Quito. A lengthy investigation with more than 1,500 messages on the WhatsApp platform exposes a strategy of attack on the Ecuadorian left, which included the murder of the former far-right presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, which occurred on August 9, 2023, 11 days before the first round of elections that already gave Luisa González, of the Citizen Revolution movement, led by Rafael Correa, as the winner.
Although several of these messages had already been leaked months ago, now Intercept, from Brazil, and Drop Site News, from the United States, revealed all the text conversations between the Attorney General of Ecuador, Diana Salazar, and the former Ecuadorian assemblyman Ronny Aleaga.
The report, titled Leaked messages reveal how a US-linked prosecutor is behind the attack on the left in Ecuadorpublished on Thursday, caused a stir on social media in the Andean country, while right-wing media corporations went silent.
The report states that The United States invested enormous resources in the investigation of the candidate’s murder: according to Salazar’s alleged messages, Villavicencio was an informant for the U.S. government. And Salazar, who was apparently in close contact with Washington’s ambassador in Quito, helped shape the public narrative of how the leftist party (Citizen Revolution) was responsible for the murder, a maneuver that successfully prevented the Correístas from returning to power, dramatically accelerating the Ecuadorian state’s vertiginous decline..
Indeed, in August 2023, after that crime, thousands of accounts were activated to hold Correa responsible. Some investigations indicate that, in less than three hours, more than 10 million messages were issued with the phrase Killer belt.
In those days, Verónica Sarauz, Villavicencio’s wife, posted a message from the X platform with a direct accusation against the former Ecuadorian president, and pointed to the same prosecutor Diana Salazar as responsible for the impunity and inaction in the investigation. In this context, it is concluded that Salazar would have delayed an investigation into drug dealers linked to former right-wing president Guillermo Lasso, to harm left-wing candidates during the 2023 elections.
Salazar admits aversion to the RC party
In one of the WhatsApp conversations, she admits that the US government did not want the Citizen Revolution to win the 2023 elections. They want RC’s head, (referring to Rafael Correa) wrote Breast (as Aleaga calls it in the chats).
The messages say Salazar knew that a criminal group had been responsible for Villavicencio’s murder. Despite this, her office handled the theory that it had been orchestrated by Correa and his allies. In those same text exchanges, the Ecuadorian prosecutor alleges that the FBI deleted confidential information from Villavicencio’s phone, during the investigation of the murder by the US agency, before delivering the content to Salazar’s office, to which the Breast referred to as procedural fraud.
In a 34-minute video, the Grayzone website, which has closely followed the investigation into the crime, also highlights that Salazar’s messages are now the subject of an investigation by her own colleagues. In addition, she faces impeachment for failure to perform duties in the National Assembly.
Also in May, a Florida lawyer representing an Ecuadorian man implicated in one of Salazar’s investigations sued the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department because the messages violate various federal laws from the United States.
The lawyer recommended that the US authorities put Salazar in the blacklist to be revealed seriously sensitive and confidential information about police agencies in that country
As of yesterday, the Ecuadorian National Prosecutor’s Office had not responded to requests for a response regarding the aforementioned revelations.
Private Dialogues
Intercept recalls that Salazar stated that this plot is a political circuswhich tries contaminate one of his most important investigations.
In March, when Aleaga began sharing the chatsSalazar said in X: I will stay focused on what is important, desperation has no limits. They will not divert our attention.
How did this all come about? Aleaga provided Drop Site with conversations exchanged on a private, anonymous messaging platform that he recorded and stored. Drop Site and The Intercept were given access to other confidential chats from a separate criminal investigation.