I'ma nomad' Durán, the city where it's unsafe for the mayor to sit at his own desk

Luis Chonillo was on his way to be sworn in as the mayor of Ecuador's most murderous city when the gunmen came to murder him.

- Tom Phillips and Blanca Moncada

"I've got two minutes left to live," the 39-year-old politician remembers thinking as he cowered in a bathroom after sprinting into a nearby home when his convoy came under attack.

Two police bodyguards and a bystander were killed in the shootout on 15 May last year. Chonillo fled the country with his family, who remain abroad. The assassins have yet to be caught. And eight months later, as Ecuador reels from one of the worst outbreaks of violence in its recent history, Chonillo has yet to occupy his office in Durán's city hall.

"I call myself a nomad mayor," he said from a safe house in a secret location "deep in the mountains" of Ecuador. "I might be in one city today, tomorrow I'm somewhere else. I never spend more than two nights in the same place ... I have a police escort and I mostly work online... I haven't been able to sit in the mayor's chair a single time."

Last week's convulsion - coupled with the 2023 assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio - brought Ecuador's slide into drug-related carnage to a global audience. But the relentless bloodletting afflicting cities such as Durán is no secret to the 300,000 or so people who inhabit this municipality on the country's western Pacific coast.