Leaked Chats Reveal a U.S.-Linked Prosecutor Is Behind the Assault on Ecuador’s Social Democratic Movement
Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio on August 8, 2023. Photo by RODRIGO BUENDIA/AFP via Getty Images.
The messages show how Ecuador’s attorney general is using her office to attack the left — in alliance with the U.S.
by José Olivares and Ryan Grim
You may remember a few months ago when Ecuador briefly stumbled onto the global stage, first when narco gangs broke out of prison and took over a TV crew live on air and then when President Daniel Noboa’s government launched a genuinely shocking raid of the Mexican embassy, dragging out Jorge Glas, the leftist former vice president of Rafael Correa, who was being given asylum by Mexico. You may also remember it took the U.S. a disturbing amount of time to issue a statement even mildly skeptical of the extraordinary breach of diplomatic norms.
How did Ecuador go from one of the safest countries in the Americas, a rising and stable social democracy, to a rogue, flailing narco-state with a surging crime wave? U.S. hostility to any social democratic government that attempts to chart an independent path, it turns out, is a central part of the answer.
Drawing on more than a thousand text messages sent by Ecuador’s top prosecutor, Diana Salazar—a rising star recently fêted in Time magazine by USAID’s Samantha Power—my colleague José Olivares and I have produced a new investigation mapping out the way the social democratic movement of Correa has been systematically undermined—hollowing out Ecuadorian state capacity and making way for an alliance of right-wing oligarchs and narco-traffickers to seize power—all under the guise of battling corruption. The U.S., with some notable exceptions, does not exert power through the blunt force of military coups or armed-and-funded paramilitaries in the way that it used to. But in many ways, the result is the same.
We’re publishing this investigation in Spanish as well as Portuguese with TI Brasil, an investigative non-profit that perviously uncovered a Brazilian scandal similar in many ways to this one, involving U.S.-linked, politically ambitious prosecutors willing to bend the rules in pursuit of an agenda. That campaign was aimed at the social democratic movement of Lula da Silva, who has since been freed from prison and returned to the presidency. Correa remains in exile.
With apologies, I know the story we wrote is quite long. If you have the time, it’s worth it, but if you don’t, don’t worry, you can get most of what you need out of the first 2,000 or so words of it. It’s as long as it is because it’s important to get everything we found into the public record, particularly as Ecuador heads into elections early next year.
U.S.-Ecuador relations at the very top, meanwhile, are going swimmingly. The State Department on Tuesday announced that Ecuador had agreed to join the “Minerals Security Partnership,” after receiving Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and Environment Jose W. Fernandez in Quito. Noted the statement from the State Department: “The decision to join the MSP Forum will expand cooperation between Ecuador, the United States, and all MSP Partners and MSP Forum countries to promote trade across the entire value chain from exploration, extraction, processing, and refining, to recycling and recovery.”
Three bullets to the head ended a presidential campaign, sending a South American nation and parts of Washington D.C. reeling. Fernando Villavicencio, a charismatic Ecuadorian politician, had been rising in the polls in the August 2023 snap elections by promising to take on the corrupting influence of violent, organized drug cartels. Less than two weeks before the election, as the candidate walked among a cheering crowd towards his car at a campaign event, an assassin shot him dead.
The brazen killing rocked Ecuador and brought international attention to the nation’s election. Villavicencio's supporters quickly blamed leftist Rafael Correa, president from 2007 to 2017, and his party for the candidate’s assassination, without evidence.
Then, the U.S. government got involved: First, the State Department announced a multimillion-dollar reward for information leading to those who planned the killing, and later, the FBI sent a team of agents to investigate the assassination.
Now, leaked private messages said to be sent by Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar, and reviewed by Drop Site News and The Intercept Brasil, reveal why the U.S. invested so many resources to investigate the candidate’s assassination: according to the messages, Villavicencio was a U.S. government informant. And Salazar, who was in close contact with the U.S. ambassador, helped shape a public narrative that the leftist party was to blame for the killing—a maneuver that successfully kept the Correaistas from returning to power and dramatically accelerated the Ecuadorian state's staggering descent.
The sensitive revelation is one of many that comes from the series of leaked chats between a former Ecuadorian assemblymember and an account he says was Salazar.
Drop Site is the first English-language outlet to obtain complete access to the explosive chat records that reveal the inner workings of a politically motivated attack on the leading leftist political party, all with the blessing of the U.S.
Some of the messages have been reported on by the Ecuadorian media, which has buried the story. The foreign press has largely ignored the leaks, which provide a rare and intimate look into an example of the underhanded, U.S.-backed right-wing playbook. This playbook has, over the last decade, duped much of the media, promoted reactionary movements and anti-political sentiments, rolled back social gains, and wreaked political havoc in Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, and beyond. Former president Donald Trump has also flirted with it, by attempting to use the U.S. Justice Department to go after political adversaries.
The Salazar messages are now the subject of an investigation by Salazar's colleagues and she is currently facing impeachment for “breach of duties” within the National Assembly, a process primarily led by the left-wing political party. In May, a Florida-based criminal attorney, representing an Ecuadorian man implicated in one of Salazar’s investigations, wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department, claiming that the messages “violate several federal laws” in the U.S. The attorney recommended the U.S. blacklist Salazar for revealing “highly sensitive and confidential information” from U.S. law enforcement agencies.
Salazar and her attorney did not respond to a request for an interview nor to a detailed list of questions from Drop Site and The Intercept Brasil. She has never denied that the chats belong to her, but Salazar has called the entire ordeal a political circus, saying that it is an attempt to “contaminate” one of her major investigations. In March, when the assemblymember began releasing the chats, Salazar said on X, formerly known as Twitter: “I will remain focused on what is important, desperation knows no bounds. They will not distract our attention.”
Since being appointed in April 2019, Salazar has become one of Washington’s strongest allies in the country, with U.S. officials championing her as a crusader against corruption: the State Department presented her with an award; later this year, she’ll receive another award from the Woodrow Wilson Center; and Samantha Power, the USAID administrator, wrote a glowing profile of Salazar for TIME magazine. U.S. support is essential for a non-leftist with political aspirations. With the exception of Correa's presidency, the bilateral relations have historically been so tight that in 2000 Ecuador even went so far as to replace its own currency with the dollar.
Salazar has led a series of high-profile prosecutions to—as she has claimed—root out corruption in Ecuador, whipping up a national fever of anti-corruption and anti-political sentiments. Among the targets of investigations include the last three former presidents: Rafael Correa, Lenín Moreno, and Guillermo Lasso. (The impeachment case laid out by her political opponents accuses her of strategically accelerating cases against leftists while delaying others, including the ones implicating Lasso and Moreno, both right-wingers.)
Now, the tranche of hundreds of private messages show Salazar may have revealed sensitive information from the investigations, lending credence to allegations by Correistas that she engaged in a pattern of politically motivated actions, including aggressively pursuing cases against left-wing politicians while simultaneously delaying cases against more pro-U.S. right-wingers.
The messages, exchanged with Ronny Aleaga, a close confidante formerly of Correa’s party, call into question Salazar’s prosecutorial ethics and impartiality. The relationship between Aleaga and Salazar, ostensible political rivals, remains a source of mystery and intrigue in Ecuador. He told Drop Site their relationship was not romantic, but one of intimate confidence. Whatever the case, the messages, in which Salazar’s purported contact is registered as “Seño,” read as two people close to each other swapping political information, with the relationship going through twists and turns as Aleaga’s role in her investigations fluctuates. In an interview, Aleaga claimed he did not know why Salazar was sharing sensitive information regarding her investigations.
“I am also confused,” Aleaga told Drop Site. “If we were political adversaries, why was there this communication? I’m not sure.”
Aleaga provided Drop Site with conversations exchanged on an anonymous, private messaging platform that he recorded and saved. Drop Site and The Intercept Brasil also accessed other sensitive chats submitted as evidence in a separate criminal investigation. Overall, we reviewed over 1,500 private messages, spanning mostly from March 2023 to March of this year.
Diana Salazar, the current Ecuadorian Attorney General, in 2017. Photo by RODRIGO BUENDIA/AFP via Getty Images.
The release of these messages comes amid a defining moment in Ecuadorian history. Not long ago, Ecuador was in many ways the envy of Latin America. Today, economic freefall, gutted social spending, and political violence by increasingly brazen narco gangs are tanking the popularity of its right-wing president, heir to a billionaire banana fortune.
As narco violence lays bare the country's political unraveling, two figures are attempting to seize the crisis and define the moment: current president Daniel Noboa has chosen a hard-line, U.S.-backed militarized approach to combat organized crime and Salazar continues to disrupt the political establishment by pursuing investigations she says are related to corruption and drug trafficking.
The causes of such a dramatic reversal of national fortunes are inevitably multifaceted, but Ecuador's fate follows a specific pattern that has roiled many countries in the region in recent years—oftentimes with secretive support of the U.S. government, ultimately benefiting U.S. corporations and their local right-wing allies.
Among the allegations emerging from the leaked messages:
Salazar may have delayed an investigation into businessmen linked to former right-wing president Guillermo Lasso to harm left-wing candidates during the 2023 snap elections.
Salazar admitted the U.S. government did not want Correa's Movimiento Revolución Ciudadana, or Citizen Revolution Movement party (RC, by its acronym in Spanish) to win the 2023 elections. “They want RC’s head,” “Seño” wrote.
Salazar warned Aleaga of a looming investigation into his alleged corruption, and encouraged him to flee Ecuador prior to a warrant for his arrest.
Salazar claimed that assassinated presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was a U.S. government informant before encouraging Aleaga to become a cooperating witness for U.S. prosecutors.
According to the messages, for months, Salazar knew that a criminal group was responsible for the Villavicencio murder. Despite knowing this, Salazar’s office ran with the theory that the murder was orchestrated by Rafael Correa and his allies, allowing accusations against Correa to circulate, potentially playing a deciding role in the tight 2023 snap elections.
Salazar said she suspected the FBI deleted sensitive information from Villavicencio’s phone, during their investigation into the murder, before providing the contents to Salazar’s office, which "Seño" referred to as “procedural fraud.”
Salazar may be using her office to punish a prominent former judge who acted against U.S. government law enforcement interests.
”I Will Prosecute After The Election”
Aleaga has said publicly that between 2021 and early 2024 he and Salazar had a “secretive” relationship. Throughout that time, he said, he exchanged messages with Salazar through an encrypted platform called Confide, which deletes messages soon after they are read. As Aleaga received messages, he used another phone to video record the incoming chats. A forensic analysis ordered by Aleaga and reviewed by Drop Site confirms the messages came to Aleaga’s personal phone.