Leftist candidate Luisa Gonzalez maintains her lead ahead of Sunday’s presidential election in Ecuador, according to two new polls released yesterday, but conducted before the assassination of another centrist front-runner.

Ms. Gonzalez, candidate of the Revolución Ciudadana movement of socialist former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017), is credited with 24% of voting intentions according to a poll by the Cedatos institute and 24.9% according to a second one by the Comunicaliza institute.

According to Cedatos’ numbers, Fernando Villavicencio, who was killed by Colombian suspected hitmen a week ago after an election rally in the capital Quito, was in second place with 12.5 percent.

Right-wing candidate Jan Topic (12.2%), who promises a relentless war on crime and has been on an upward trajectory since Mr. Villavicencio’s murder, observers say, is in third place.

Left-wing indigenous candidate Yacou Peres is in fourth place (8.1%), followed by right-wing former vice president Otto Sonnenholtzner (5.1%) and three other candidates, all according to the Cedatos poll conducted from the 7th to on August 9 and has a margin of statistical error of ±3.1%.

Fernando Villavicencio, once a trade unionist, then an investigative journalist, was a fierce opponent of Mr. Correa, helped bring him to the dock for corruption with his reporting. The former president, who has received political asylum in his wife’s home country of Belgium, was sentenced to 8 years in prison for the case. He always denies that he did anything illegal.

The widow of the deceased and associates accuse – without presenting evidence – the former president, claiming that he was aware of the assassination plot and that he has “connections” with gangs.

Most of Ecuador has been put under a state of emergency after the murder. Right-wing outgoing president Guillermo Lasso blamed organized crime for the candidate’s assassination. In addition to the six Colombian alleged assassins who have been arrested, a seventh was killed in the exchange of fire with the candidate’s bodyguards.

The Construye party, whose candidate was Fernando Villavicencio, named another journalist, Cristian Surita, 53, as its new candidate. The candidacy remains to be approved by the electoral authorities.

Former President Correa’s faction contested his candidacy on Wednesday. “Koreism is trying to silence us again, confirming its fear of our candidate,” Construye complained via X (formerly Twitter).

In recent years, Ecuador, once an oasis of calm 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 candidate for the parliament had already been murdered.