27-year-old Ecuadorian mayor shot dead
Brigitte Garcia, the youngest mayor of Ecuador at 27 years old, has been shot dead.
Her and her press chief’s bodies were found in a car on Sunday in the city of San Vicente, where she had won the mayoral election last year.
No one has been arrested in connection with this yet, and the motive for these killings is unknown.
Ms. Garcia is the latest politician to be killed in this country located in the Andes mountains; Ecuador was shaken last year by the assassination of Fernando Villavicencio, a presidential candidate.
The bodies of Ms. Garcia and Jairo Lor, her communications director, were discovered early Sunday morning local time. Police said the shots were fired from inside the car they had rented.
Ms. Garcia, who was a nurse, won the election last year at the age of 26 as a representative of the opposition party called the Citizen Revolution.
This region in the province of Manabi has been severely affected by violence related to gangs involved in smuggling drugs to the lucrative markets of the U.S. and Europe.
