Ecuador | “The first reaction was panic” – The reporter tells what happened when an armed attack was made on the neighboring channel

Ecuadorianeditor of the private television channel RTU José Luis Cañizares was leaving for work in the country's capital, Quito, on Thursday morning at ten local time. Ahead was the preparation for the evening's live broadcast.

Cañizares was an exception, as most of the city's two million inhabitants were neither going to work nor to school.

“The schools are closed, so are the workplaces, and the streets are almost empty,” Cañizares told HS by phone. “The president said yesterday [keskiviikkona]that the country is in a state of war.”

Won last autumn's election Daniel Noboa, 36, took office as president of Ecuador in November. His millionaire father Álvaro Noboa the president named as the heir to the banana empire announced as a start that he would bring Ecuador's drug criminals under control.

Ecuador was long considered an oasis of peace between Colombia, ruled by drug cartels, and Peru, which earns money from coca. Today, however, Ecuadorian prisons are overcrowded.

Ecuadorian researcher at the Wilson Center in the United States Beatriz García appointed prisons recently Axios online magazine in the interview as “command centers” for criminals. According to him, the prisons are under the control of the two biggest drug gangs, Los Lobos and Los Choneros.

Leader of Los Choneros Adolfo Macías escaped from prison last Sunday. On Tuesday, the world was stunned when masked gunmen burst into the studio of the state-run TC television channel in Ecuador's largest population center, the port city of Guayaquil, mid-broadcast.

The cameraman was shot in the leg and the staff were held hostage for half an hour until the police special forces arrived, still live. The escaped criminals took hostages with them. On the same day, the police announced that they had arrested 13 attackers.

The video shows the situation in the TC channel studio:

Supplier Cañizares followed the events of the neighboring channel in the capital Quito, almost three kilometers above the sea level.

“We were live when the attack in Guayaquil took place,” Cañizares says. “The first reaction was panic. This has never happened before, and we couldn't imagine anything like this before.”

“The police closed the buildings of all the TV offices because no one could know if there would be more attacks like this,” Cañizares continues. “We immediately started broadcasting TC's signal to show the viewers what happened there.”

“We were behind the locks for eight to nine hours and continued broadcasting the whole time. The situation was absolutely terrible everywhere, people were just shouting in the street.”

Cops and soldiers have been patrolling the streets of Ecuadorian cities since Tuesday
. The president has declared a state of emergency and the mobilization of the armed forces for a period of two months.

According to Cañizares, despite the shock, the events did not come as a complete surprise.

“The violence has been escalating for two years now, and everything is related to drugs. The crime situation started to deteriorate already in 2019–2020, when Mexican criminals started entering the country. Now we have the highest homicide rates in Latin America, which is something absolutely amazing.”

“The situation in the prisons has always been bad, and now the criminals of the cartels have more than a hundred prison guards as hostages.”

President Noboa has declared a total of 22 criminal gangs as terrorist organizations. The villains have responded by declaring their own “curfews”. Earlier, the gangs forced one of the kidnapped police officers to read a direct message to the president. It said that “policemen, civilians and soldiers are spoils of war”.

Cañizares goes to work.

“You have to tell people what's happening and where we're going.”