A $3,000 donation, a photo op and an assassination case: Maria Elvira Salazar’s connection to an Ecuadorian developer accused of murder

During Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar’s 2024 re-election effort, her campaign accepted a $3,000 donation from Xavier Jordan, whom she met at a private event, posing for photos with the developer and attorney from Ecuador living in Miami. 

Now, Jordan is in serious legal trouble as Salazar is in a pitched battle to retain her seat in the midterm election,

Last month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement nabbed Jordan in Miami and are detaining him on immigration violations as Ecuador seeks his extradition to face criminal charges. Jordan allegedly helped plan and finance the 2023 assassination of Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.

Jordan contributed $3,0000 to Salazar for Congress on Oct. 29, 2024, according to federal campaign finance filings. Undated photographs posted on X last month show Jordán and the Republican congresswoman posing together at what appears to be a social gathering. In one, they stand side by side. In another, they pose with a third person. The photographs establish that they met, but not when, where or how well they knew each other.

Salazar did not respond to requests for comment sent to her congressional office and campaign spokespersons.

The congresswoman is in a dogfight with Democrat Eliott Rodriguez, another Cuban-American former television news journalist, in Florida’s competitive 27th Congressional District. The nationally watched contest stretches from Little Havana through coastal communities to Cutler Bay and west into Kendall. The race pits two familiar faces from South Florida television on opposite sides of a campaign increasingly shaped by immigration politics.

On the campaign trail, Salazar has sought to put distance between herself and President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown after helping bankroll its expansion. She voted for legislation providing tens of billions of dollars for ICE. Her votes are now being used against her as the agency’s operations generate a backlash in South Florida’s immigrant communities. 

In a September campaign ad filmed outside the White House, she told Trump his enforcement efforts had “gone too far” and warned that Hispanic voters felt “betrayed.” The election-season rebuke was meant to appeal to voters upset about the crackdown, but also provoked Trump into attacking her for being disloyal to his regime. 

How well Salazar may have known Jordan or known about the salacious accusations against him in Ecuador is unclear. But Jordan used the American legal system to combat his detractors in Ecuador, including Diana Salazar Mendez, the country’s attorney general who spearheaded the criminal probe against him. 

Jordan hired Miami attorney Richard J. Diaz, a Salazar supporter who also contributed a combined $9,000 to her reelection campaign between 2025 and this year, to represent him in several defamation lawsuits filed against Salazar Mendez and two other Ecuadorians. (Mendez is not related to Congresswoman Salazar).

Asked whether he introduced Jordán to the congresswoman, Diaz said he could not remember.

“I go to many fundraisers-legislative and judicial (and sheriff),” Diaz wrote in an email response. Sometimes, Diaz said, he sends a list of people a mass email or text “hoping to help the candidate get a good turnout.”

“There is no way for me to recall if Xavier-or any other attendee-went to the event ‘on his own’ or at my invitation,” he wrote.

ICE agents detained Jordán on Sept. 16. Ecuadorian newspaper El Universo distinguished his immigration detention from the criminal proceedings against him in Ecuador, where authorities had already sought his extradition in a separate organized-crime investigation known as Metástasis.

After the arrest, Ecuadorian Interior Minister John Reimberg said Jordán would be deported “very soon.” AFP reported that Jordán was among seven people accused of masterminding Villavicencio’s assassination. Prosecutors allege he helped finance and plan the killing.

Deportation and extradition are separate proceedings. The minister’s announcement concerned an anticipated immigration removal, while Ecuador has also pursued Jordán’s extradition.

Diaz told The Miamian that he does not represent Jordán in his immigration case. He also disputed the assassination allegations.

“As for him being an alleged ‘mastermind’ of the Villavicencio matter I can tell you that I have sworn statements from several witnesses, digital forensic evidence that eclipses the uncorroborated self-serving statement of a highly motivated snitch,” Diaz wrote.

Diaz challenged the chronology behind questions about Salazar’s acceptance of Jordán’s money.

“Have you compared the date of the donation to the date the media made the scandalous, unsupported claim?” he wrote. “I suspect the donation occurred well before MES would have any way of knowing of the claim..”

The contribution did precede the formal assassination charges. Ecuadorian prosecutors charged Jordán in September 2025, roughly 10 months after his donation to Salazar’s campaign.

But the accusations against Jordan were publicly disseminated long before he was charged and before his October 2024 donation to Salazar’s reelection campaign. 

While Ecuadorian authorities pursued criminal cases against Jordán, he pursued defamation cases in Miami-Dade County. In 2023, he sued Ecuadorian journalist Christian Zurita Ron over statements on X that allegedly tied Jordan to drug trafficking, money laundering, criminal organizations and fugitives. Diaz represented Jordán.

The complaint accused Ron of falsely portraying Jordán as a member of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and as a fugitive who collaborated with other fugitives from justice, among other allegations. In 2025, a jury awarded Jordán $31 million in that case, according to the court records reviewed by The Miamian.

Jordán also filed a defamation lawsuit against Villavicencio in 2023, alleging substantially similar false accusations. He voluntarily dismissed that case two weeks after Villavicencio, an Ecuadorian legislator known for investigating corruption, was shot and killed in Quito on Aug. 9, 2023.

The investigation into who ordered his assassination continued after convictions of people involved in carrying it out. 

Meanwhile, Jordan filed two more defamation lawsuits targeting Salazar Mendez. The first complaint was filed in 2024, which Jordan voluntarily dismissed on Jan. 14 of this year. The same month, Jordan filed the second lawsuit making the same accusations. 

Jordan alleged the former Ecuadorian attorney general of defaming him on CNN in 2024 by falsely linking him to the assassination.

Salazar Méndez’s attorneys responded with a July 31 motion to dismiss that portrayed the lawsuit as an effort to use Miami’s court system to silence the ex-prosecutor. They called it “part of a transparent pattern of serial litigation” aimed at attacking her reputation “under the protection of a court filing.”

His purpose, her attorneys alleged, was “not to vindicate any legal right, but to use this Court’s docket to generate publicity.” The motion invoked Florida’s anti-SLAPP law and argued that the challenged statements concerned an investigation Salazar Méndez oversaw as Ecuador’s attorney general. 

Her attorneys also pointed to the criminal charges later brought under her successor as grounds for rejecting Jordán’s portrayal of the accusations as fabricated.

Diaz’s relationship with Jordán has had its own courthouse detour.

In February, the Miami attorney sued his client for breach of contract, alleging that he represented Jordán in more than a dozen legal matters between 2023 and 2025 and was owed $2 million in fees by June 2025. The following month, a judge granted Diaz’s request to be removed as Jordan’s attorney in the Salazar Mendez case, court records show. 

According to the complaint, when Jordán failed to sign a $2 million free agreement, he offered Diaz warranty deeds to three single-family homes developed by his company in LaBelle, Florida. Their arrangement would have credited $900,000—the homes’ agreed value—against the outstanding legal bill.

Diaz alleged that Jordán subsequently wired him $100,000 and $313,000 but failed to deliver the deeds or sign the $2 million fee agreement. Between October and February, Jordán “came up with one excuse after another,” the lawsuit alleged.

After Jordán indicated that he intended to terminate Diaz’s services, the attorney submitted a prorated bill of $575,160, minus the $313,000 payment, according to the complaint.

Jordán disputed that accounting. In an April answer and affirmative defenses, he denied owing Diaz money and asserted that email and financial records showed a $14,050 credit balance. The lawsuit and counterclaim were dismissed in June.

Asked about the dispute, Diaz said Jordán ultimately paid everything he owed. He blamed the falling-out on Jordán’s wife.

“We mended the relationship after he apologized for his wife’s misguidance and he reengaged me to jump back into his other litigation matters which I was happy to do,” Diaz wrote.

On Sept. 17, a day after Jordán’s detention, X user Malena Jarrin Anton posted the photographs of him with Congresswoman Salazar and demanded an explanation.

“As a registered Republican in Florida, I demand true law and order,” the post read. “How do you explain this photo with Xavier Jordán—indicted in Ecuador for the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio and now detained by ICE in Louisiana?”

The post tagged both Salazar and Jordán.

The post did not establish the date or circumstances of the encounter. Sometimes, Diaz explained, people he invites to fundraisers arrive before he does and introduce themselves to the candidate. Other times, especially close to an election, he attends two or three events in a night.

For now, the documented connection consists of a campaign contribution, photographs and a shared relationship with a Miami attorney who has also donated to Salazar’s political operation.

The congresswoman has not explained when she met Jordán, what she knew about his legal troubles or whether her campaign intends to keep his money.

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