The president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, said this Wednesday (22) that the second phase of the “war” he has been waging since the beginning of the year against organized crime gangs has begun, with the issuance of a new state of emergency which covers seven of the country’s 24 provinces, as well as a municipality in an eighth province.
Noboa declared a 60-day state of emergency in the coastal provinces of Guayas (whose capital is Guayaquil), Santa Elena, Manabí, El Oro and Los Ríos, and the Amazonian provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana, as well as in the municipality of Camilo Ponce Enríquez, in the Andean province of Azuay, in the south of the country, whose mayor was recently assassinated.
This state of emergency replaces the one that was applied on April 30 in five provinces (Guayas, Santa Elena, Manabí, El Oro and Los Ríos) and which, on May 10, was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court, which considered that the measure was not properly substantiated.
“Today we find ourselves in the second stage of the war, a war that has become sectorized. The criminal gangs, faced with the military offensive, took refuge and entrenched themselves in seven provinces,” Noboa said in a video message released on social media to announce the new state of emergency.
He emphasized that “these are the provinces that most need the Armed Forces and police to have freedom of action.”
“To win in this second stage of the war, we need the military to have permission to act, so that the criminals and terrorists who take refuge and mock justice in their right to the inviolability of their home know that they will lose it,” he added.
The new state of emergency includes the suspension of the right to the inviolability of home and correspondence in the territories in question and orders the national Human Rights authority to report on aspects relating to armed attacks or threats from criminal gangs.
This decree does not provide for the mobilization of the Armed Forces to support the police in operations against organized crime, as the measure is already permanent, approved in the national referendum on April 21, and no longer depends on the decree of a state of emergency.
In that referendum, Noboa received broad support for a series of reforms to strengthen the fight against organized crime, but two economic reforms to legalize hourly employment contracts and allow international arbitrations with investors in any jurisdiction were rejected.
Since the beginning of the year, Noboa has elevated the fight against organized crime to the category of an “internal armed conflict”, classifying criminal gangs as terrorist groups and belligerent non-state actors.
Additionally, he decreed a national state of emergency that ran from January 8 to April 7, militarizing prisons, which are epicenters of the country’s violence crisis, as many are dominated by criminal gangs.
These gangs, mainly involved in drug trafficking, have contributed to Ecuador becoming one of the countries with the highest homicide rates in Latin America, with a rate of 47 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, according to the Ecuadorian Observatory of the Organized Crime (Oeco).
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