Crowds paid their last respects Friday to Ecuador’s presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, who was shot dead by “Colombian hitmen” on Wednesday, police said.

His body was put on display in a popular pilgrimage to a convention center in Quito, which had been overrun with posters of him. The coffin was draped in the Ecuadorian flag. A big screen broadcast moments from the election campaign of the late Villavicencio, who polls showed as the second favorite in the August 20 presidential election.

Six Colombians have been arrested for his murder, while a seventh was killed in a shootout with police.

“The day before yesterday they gassed democracy with bullets, the day before yesterday they crippled the fight against corruption,” Antonio López, head of Fernando Villavicencio’s campaign, said in his eulogy.

An ardent critic of corruption and organized crime, the 59-year-old Villavicencio was running for Ecuador’s presidency for the first time.

“I will fight to the end to find the guilty, I will not allow them to go unpunished,” promised journalist Cristian Surita, a friend of the deceased with whom he conducted the investigation against former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017). Belgium granted asylum to Korea, who was sentenced in absentia to 8 years in prison for corruption.

Fernando Villavicencio, a former trade unionist and journalist before becoming a politician and an elected member of parliament, was among the eight candidates in the first round of the presidential election.

Following the brutal killing, Ecuador’s outgoing president Guillermo Lasso declared three days of national mourning and a 60-day state of emergency across the country to mobilize the military and security forces to guarantee the smooth running of the election process.

In recent years, Ecuador, once an oasis of calm and peace in Latin America, has turned into a theater of undeclared war between gangs mainly engaged in drug trafficking. In the middle of an election period, before the presidential candidate, a mayor and a parliamentary candidate had already been murdered.