Ecuador is at war against narcotics. The challenge to the State that has launched organized crime is not new, but the events of Tuesday have provoked an unprecedented reaction from the Government of right-wing President Daniel Noboa, who has not even been in office for two months and that last year he won the elections and promised precisely that he would put an end to the narcotics racket.
“We are in a state of war and we cannot give in to these terrorists”, declared Noboa yesterday, after the previous day he said that Ecuador is in an “internal armed conflict” and ordered the armed forces to act militarily against 22 criminal gangs, led by Los Choneros and Los Lobos, which came to be considered as “terrorist” groups.
Noboa acknowledged that the moment is “hard” and that “this wave of violence is not an accident”. The president announced the deportation of about 1,500 foreign prisoners who are serving sentences in Ecuador, assured that the drug trafficking groups have about 200,000 people in their service and referred to the infiltration of organized crime in the State. “Judges who help terrorists will also be considered as part or members of the terrorist network”, he warned. And to the narcos he said: “If they want to resist and show off, let them be brave and fight against the military”.
The last straw was the images of a group of armed criminals entering the set and interrupting a live broadcast of TC Televisión in Guayaquil, the economic capital of the country. The intervention of the police succeeded in freeing the hostages and arresting the thirteen assailants.
At the same time, similar actions also took place on Tuesday, mostly in the coastal city – with 29 attacks – and in other parts of the country, where there was also looting. The narcos – 70 were arrested – sowed terror in a hospital, university classrooms, shops or, simply, by shooting in the streets, with the result of ten deaths, including the popular singer Diego Gallardo, attacked by a stray bullet in Guayaquil when he was going to pick up his son at school.
The gangs were reacting to Noboa’s decision on Monday to declare a state of emergency and night curfew for two months, after it was learned that the head of Los Choneros, Adolfo Macías, alias Fito, had escaped , who had been in Guayaquil’s Litoral prison since 2011 to serve a 34-year sentence for organized crime, murder and drug trafficking.
The Government was considering transferring Fito to a maximum security prison and making more movements of narcos, as one of Noboa’s first measures to stop the problem of insecurity, since the leaders of the gangs exercise control from inside the prisons, from where they continue to direct their criminal activities.
At the same time, to put pressure on him, there were riots in prisons in Cuenca, Azogues, Napo, Ambato and Latacunga, which continued last night, with 139 hostages, mostly prison guards, but also administrative staff.
The entire Ecuadorian opposition initially supported the measures taken by Noboa, including former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017). Despite this, Correa charged yesterday against the president, who he described as a “totally unprepared person”. Correa added that “drug trafficking has infiltrated the State” and blamed the current situation of violence on the conservative governments that succeeded him: “They are reaping the whole harvest of these years of destruction, of political persecution, in what they forgot about the common good of administering the State to the governments in turn”.
“The president has taken extreme measures” in the face of a “brutal display of power”, says Christian Zurita in La Vanguardia from Quito. Who was the third most voted candidate in last year’s presidential elections – after replacing Fernando Villavicencio, murdered by the narco – assures that, after “this show of power by the leaders of organized crime, they will retreat”. Zurita describes gang leaders as “very strategic: they take control, cause chaos and disappear”.
The former candidate, who on Tuesday came out publicly to support the measures announced by Noboa, says that “since the murder of Villavicencio there has been an escalation of violence” in Ecuador and says that “the Government must show firmness to take control of the prisons”.
