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.

Now, leaked private messages purportedly 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 Salazar’s purported messages, Villavicencio was a U.S. government informant. And Salazar, who was apparently 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.

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.