The cars that passed through the main avenue of Durán, a small city in Ecuador that borders Guayaquil, dodged a bundle that hung by a rope from the bridge at the entrance, it was the body of a man with a naked torso. His head almost touched the asphalt. Higher up, another corpse was suspended, its hands tied behind its back and a noose around its neck. Both had signs of having been tortured. It was February 14, 2022 and for the first time Ecuador reported news about bodies hanging on bridges. For the first time, he accepted the message: organized crime had broken through the prison walls and was on the streets with a violence that this South American country had never experienced. That scene provoked fear and silence.
By then, the deaths from violent crimes already numbered in the thousands, 2,500 last year. After that episode, the wave of violence took on uncontrollable dimensions under the only formula that the Government has applied to combat the spread of crime, which has been to decree states of emergency so that the military can also take control of public security on the streets. along with the police.
The data shows the failed result. In 2022 alone, the country spent 165 days militarized under four states of exception decreed by the president, Guillermo Lasso. That same year, the country closed with the highest homicide rate in its history, 26 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants, according to official data.
Ecuadorians had never experienced such rates of violence before. Before 2019, violent deaths did not even reach a thousand. The police were mainly engaged in patrolling the streets to deal with minor crimes such as cell phone theft and street fights. The cities vibrated with festivals for saints and civic dates. The weather had always helped commerce stay active late. Violence has never escalated to levels that lock people in their homes, force businesses to close or suspend classes in schools, as it happens now.
With 4,200 violent deaths so far this year, Ecuador is close to surpassing its own record. At the current rate, by the end of this year it could reach a crime rate of 40 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, placing it among the most violent countries in the world.
The discourse of the Lasso government was, for a long time, that the crimes corresponded to a fight for territory between criminal gangs, reducing the problem to the fact that those who died were criminals. But the figures for other common crimes do not fit with the Executive’s narrative. Ecuadorians live the terror of being extorted and kidnapped every day. According to the State Attorney General’s Office, between January 2022 and June of this year, it has registered 15,671 complaints of extortion and 1,556 for kidnapping, of which only 59 cases have culminated in a conviction. 90% continue in the first judicial stage of prior investigation.
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The centers of crime operations are concentrated in prisons, where the leaders of the criminal groups that predominate in the streets of Ecuador are located. The prison wards are divided by criminal gangs, where the inmates have access to everything: satellite communication, drones, alcohol, a gym, drugs, money, weapons of all calibers, thousands of ammunition, explosives, they even have the privileges of celebrating. the birthdays of the leaders with fireworks. “Prisons, on the one hand, are centers of punishment and, on the other, schools for criminal tactics,” describes in a report the Penitentiary Dialogue Commission formed by the Government in one of the attempts to pacify the prisons.
High levels of crime are accompanied by corruption and impunity. After the last prison massacre in the Litoral Penitentiary on July 25, the Armed Forces carried out an operation in which they seized more than 30,000 ammunition, weapons, grenades… An image that is repeated.
For the first time, the operations touched the administrative offices of the State institution responsible for prisons. The soldiers opened the roofs and found weapons, rifles, ammunition, drugs and money.
The Prosecutor’s Office also prosecuted nine officials, including the director of the detention center. “If external supervision mechanisms are not established for the Police and Armed Forces, organized crime will continue to infiltrate to the marrow,” says Luis Córdova, coordinator of the Research, Order, Conflict, and Violence program at the Central University of Ecuador.
The shooting murder of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio has focused on the actions of the Government, which attributes the expansion of violence to the fact that crime ceased to be under the hegemony of a gang known since the 1990s as Los Choneros, made up of hitmen trained in the surroundings of the town of Chone, which is in the coastal province of Manabí.
In December 2020 the ringleader of this criminal group, alias itchy, was assassinated, a few months after being released from prison after being sentenced for murder, for escaping from the maximum security center and for bringing prohibited objects into prison. However, a judge decided that he could finish serving the sentence outside of him. Without the head that he coordinated thousands of choneros who belonged to the gang, the struggle to assume the leadership bled the prisons where those who finally assumed the succession, alias Fito and ‘Jr’, were being held. The latter was assassinated in May in Colombia after having obtained pre-release.
The Choneros were divided into other gangs such as Los Lobos, Tiguerones, Chone Killers, who are the ones who in search of power and territory sow terror in different cities of the country.
“The penetration of organized crime did not come overnight, it has many edges,” declared the Minister of Government, Henry Cucalón, hours after the crime against presidential candidate Villavicencio, which has shocked Ecuador. The minister is confident that the State’s strategy in the war against crime will offer results “obviously with the Government’s responsibilities at the forefront, of course, no one has separated them. But there is involvement, the Armed Forces, judicial issues, there are many things and they are working on it”.
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