Presidential candidate near shootout, mayor target of assassination attempt: campaigning ahead of today’s early presidential and parliamentary elections continued to be marred by violence on the eve of voting.

Right-wing candidate Otto Sonnenholtzner said on Saturday that gunfire erupted in front of the store where he was having breakfast with his family, adding that neither he nor anyone close to him was hurt via X (the former Twitter).

“We experienced an exchange of fire near where I was having breakfast with my family,” in the port of Guayaquil (southwest), said the former vice president of the right (2018-2020).

His team did not specify whether he was the target.

The police, however, spoke of a “pursuit” in the area after a robbery at a store.

Mr. Sonnenholzner’s announcement was made while a mayor close to the socialist ex-president Rafael Correa also said yesterday Saturday that he was the target of an assassination attempt, however he is safe.

“They tried to kill me 40 minutes ago, there are more than eight witnesses,” Francisco (“Pancho”) Tamaris, the mayor of La Libertad, a coastal city of 100,000 near the financial capital of Guayaquil, said via X.

The elected official then explained that as he was returning from Guayaquil, around midnight on Friday night, his armored pickup truck was targeted by two plainclothes men who got out of a police vehicle.

“Within seconds, they riddled the vehicle with bullets (…), they started shooting at us without even asking who we were,” added the mayor, with his wife by his side, who was in the car with him.

Ecuador’s election campaign was indelibly marked by the August 9 assassination of one of the favorites for the presidency, centrist candidate Fernando Villavicencio, against a background of unprecedented violence in the country and the spread of drug cartels.

In recent years, the Latin American state, once an oasis of calm, has experienced an unprecedented wave of violent crimes linked to drug trafficking. Prisons have become a gang battleground and theater of repeated massacres, with over 430 deaths since 2021.

And in 2022, the country registered a record homicide rate of 26 per 100,000 inhabitants.

During the election campaign, in addition to presidential candidate Villavicencio, a mayor, parliamentary candidate and a local official of Mr. Correa’s party were also murdered.

Right-wing presidential candidate Daniel Noboa claimed on Thursday that he was the target of an attack by gunmen from which he escaped unharmed. Authorities disputed his version.