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(CN) — An Ecuadorian businessman levied a defamation lawsuit against the attorney general of Ecuador on Tuesday, claiming he has been falsely accused of involvement in the assassination of a presidential political candidate named Fernando Alcibiades Villavicencio.
Xavier Jordan accuses Diana Salazar Mendez in the complaint filed in Miami-Dade County of making multiple false statements about Jordan on CNN TV since late 2023 relating him to the murder.
Jordan does not list the exact statements at issue, but Jordan asserts they were “made with actual knowledge or reckless disregard for their falsity.”
Jordan’s suit comes after he was formally charged along with three others by Mendez’s office on September 3 for masterminding the infamous killing of Villavicencio, a national assemblyman and a leading candidate in Ecuador’s 2023 presidential election.
While he proclaims his innocence, Jordan is accused of directing and financing the operation, alongside former Interior Minister José Serrano, who prosecutors claim was in charge of identifying gaps in Villavicencio’s security and leading a team of police officers.
In October, the FBI raided Jordan’s multi-million dollar home in Miami for several hours, removing multiple boxes from his home.
Jordan’s attorney, Richard Diaz, said Tuesday that authorities were looking for unexplained assets, but found nothing to support their claims.
“And now they’re embarrassed,” Diaz said of Ecuador’s Attorney General’s office.
Daniel Salcedo, another Ecuadorian businessman, was charged for monitoring Villavicencio’s movements and Ronny Aleaga, a former national assemblyman and Latin Kings gang member, was accused of being the link between the assassins who carried out the murder.
Prosecutors have not presented a clear motive for the killing, but Jordan, Salcedo and Aleaga were previously implicated in Metastasis, a massive case that exposed high-level government corruption and connections with organized crime in Ecuador.
The case led by Mendez took down a drug-trafficking network that was embedded in the highest reaches of the Ecuadorian government and led by Leandro Norero, a top ally of the Lobos gang before his murder in 2022.
While only Salcedo has been sentenced in the Metastasis case, prosecutors presented evidence showing Jordan maintained contact with Norero, who was also the financier of the narco-criminal group, Los Lobos.
Following Villavicencio’s murder, a video circulated online of men purporting to be members of Los Lobos claiming responsibility for the attack, although the claim has been refuted by other members who said they were being framed.
Ecuadorian authorities previously made numerous arrests and secured convictions related to Villavicencio’s murder. In July 2024, Carlos Edwin Angulo, the Lobos leader, was sentenced to 34 years in prison for helping orchestrate the crime from behind bars. His arrest came after six Colombian citizens accused of links to the plot were murdered in prison in October 2023.
Still, Mendez and her office have faced persistent criticism, including from Villavicencio’s family, for failing to uncover the intellectual authors of the assassination plot.
On April 8, 2025, Villavicencio’s widow, Verónica Sarauz, through her X account, said Mendez’s investigation is tainted by political and drug trafficking interests, and that even the prosecutor herself and President Daniel Noboa could be involved in concealing information about her husband’s murder.
The brazen assassination of Villavicencio, an investigative journalist who became a leading presidential candidate for speaking out against escalating crime and corruption, was the most notorious act of violence in Ecuador’s recent history. The 59-year-old was gunned down in broad daylight at a campaign event in the capital Quito, just ten days before the first round of voting in the presidential election was set to take place.
Police subsequently killed the shooter, an 18-year-old Colombian from a poor neighborhood in the southwestern city of Cali, at the scene.
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