A day before the nation’s general elections, the mayor of a city in Ecuador said on Saturday that he had been the target of an attempted assassination.
La Libertad’s mayor, Francisco Tamariz, claimed he survived the attack on Friday evening, during which assailants fired 30 rounds at his car.
“They tried to kill me,” Tamariz said on X, formerly known as Twitter, adding that several people had witnessed the shooting.
Later, he claimed in a Facebook post that as he was driving back late Friday night from nearby Guayaquil, two assailants jumped out of a police car and started shooting at his armored van.
“In just seconds, they started to riddle the vehicle with bullets… without ever asking who was in it,” he said in the Facebook post, appearing in a bulletproof vest alongside his wife, who was in the van with him at the time.
After a campaign characterized by the assassination of a leading candidate, Ecuador will hold a presidential election on Sunday and promises to combat the lawlessness that has overtaken the nation.
The tiny South American nation has recently developed into a haven for foreign drug cartels looking to export cocaine from its borders, sparking a bloody gang war there.
The deaths of several politicians in the run-up to the election highlighted the difficulties facing Ecuador’s leaders. The murder rate has risen above those of Mexico and Colombia.
The most well-known of them was Fernando Villavicencio, a presidential contender and outspoken opponent of corruption, who was shot and killed in broad daylight as he left a political event just days before the election.
Additionally, a right-wing presidential candidate named Otto Sonnenholzner said on Saturday’s episode of X that he saw a shooting in Guayaquil while eating breakfast with his family.
“Thank God we are all fine, but we demand an investigation into what happened,” said the former Ecuadoran vice president.
He said was “pained by the fear and helplessness I saw in the eyes of everyone present,” and urged the country to vote to “change course” in Sunday’s election.
Sonnenholzner initially questioned whether he had been the intended target of the gunfire, but then claimed that there had been “a police chase a few meters away” that resulted in the capture of five “criminals who put dozens of families at risk.”
Police added that there had been a chase following an attempted store robbery.
