Ecuador's youngest mayor has been shot dead in what her party describes as an assassination. Brigitte Garcia, the 27-year-old mayor of the coastal town of San Vicente, was found dead in a car Sunday alongside communications director Jairo Loor, the BBC reports. Police say the shots that killed the pair were fired from inside the rented vehicle. Ecuador is in the third month of a state of emergency declared by President Daniel Noboa amid rising drug-related violence. San Vicente is in Manabi province, an area hit especially hard by violence linked to cocaine-trafficking gangs.
The motive for the killings is unclear. CBS News reports that in one of her final posts on social media, Garcia wrote about a project to bring water to the community, saying, "Together, we're building a brighter future." Garcia was a member of former President Rafael Correa's Citizen Revolution Movement party, reports Reuters. In a post on X, Luisa Gonzalez, the party's presidential candidate in last year's election, called the killing an assassination. "I have no words, in shock, nobody is safe in Ecuador NOBODY," she said, per Reuters. Another presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, was assassinated at a rally north of Quito last year. (More Ecuador stories.)
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