Ecuador is in crisis. While the South American country experienced an increase in street murders of 800% between 2018 and 2023, going from 6 to 46 per 100,000 inhabitants, the security situation in the country has greatly deteriorated in recent days. The country’s president, Daniel Noboa, even recognized through a presidential decree “the existence of an internal armed conflict” and ordered “the mobilization and intervention of the armed forces and the national police (…) to guarantee national sovereignty and integrity against organized crime, terrorist organizations and non-state belligerents.
Escapes and mutinies
In a country with 18 million inhabitants, which in recent years has become the hub for the export of cocaine produced in neighboring countries, drug traffickers have gained power. Elected to the presidency last November, after promising to restore the country’s security, Daniel Noboa finds himself in an untenable situation. It all started on Sunday January 7 when the leader of the Choneros gang, Adolfo Macias, nicknamed “Fito”, escaped from prison in Guayaquil, a port city located in the west of the country.
This individual, with a criminal CV as long as his arm, was sentenced in 2011 to a 34-year prison term for organized crime, drug trafficking and murder. It was in 2020 that he became the leader of the gang which has nearly 8,000 members.
Security forces “are hard at work finding this extremely dangerous individual”, declared Communications Secretary Roberto Izurieta, during an interview given to a local TV channel. He also deplored that “the level of infiltration” of criminal groups within the state “is very high” and described the Ecuadorian penitentiary system as a “failure.”
Unfortunately, this escape had a domino effect. On Tuesday, one of the leaders of Los Lobos, another powerful drug trafficking gang, also escaped from the prison where he was locked up and numerous mutinies took place in other prison establishments in the country. Some videos posted on social media on Tuesday showed the execution of at least two guards, by shooting and hanging. The prison administration, for its part, reported 139 members of its staff being held hostage in five prisons across the country.
Shocking scenes
On Tuesday, a television program filmed in Guayaquil was disrupted live by armed men. The latter briefly took journalists and employees of the channel hostage before being arrested by the police. No one was reported killed or injured in the raid and 13 attackers were arrested.
In the coastal town of Machala, “three police officers who were on duty” were kidnapped, the police announced during the night from Monday to Tuesday on X (formerly Twitter). A fourth police officer was kidnapped in Quito by three individuals aboard “a vehicle with tinted windows and no plates”. Other images, the veracity of which remains difficult to verify, show cities in the grip of chaos, including Molotov cocktail attacks, cars set on fire, random shootings at police officers and even scenes of large-scale panic.
While many hotels and restaurants have closed in several large cities across the country, the Ministry of Education also ordered Tuesday evening the closure of all schools in the country until Friday. The Ecuadorian president provided him with an exhaustive list of criminal gangs whose “neutralization” he wants, while emphasizing the need for the armed forces to act “with respect for human rights.”
The international community reacts
On the French side, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has asked French people who wish to go to Ecuador to “postpone their plans”. On the Russian side, Moscow asked its nationals to “take into account the instability of the situation when considering trips to Ecuador” and “to avoid going to public places”.
The United States showed itself to be “extremely concerned about the violence” and “ready to provide assistance”, through the head of American diplomacy for Latin America, Brian Nichols. Other countries on the continent such as Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru have also expressed their support for Ecuador.