Only 24 hours after the popular consultation in which Daniel Noboa received the people's approval to outline a new security policy based on the presence of the military in the streets and extend sentences for various crimes, the Ecuadorian Government scores a new blow to security with the arrest of Fabricio Colón Pico, one of the leaders of the criminal gang Los Lobos who escaped from prison in the darkest week for the president, which forced him to declare a state for the first time in the country of internal armed conflict.
The group of police waited until dawn to carry out the coup against Colón Pico, who after escaping made a video in which he addressed the president to explain the reasons for his escape, assuring that they were going to kill him. Pico had escaped from the Riobamba prison on January 8 in the middle of a riot where 32 other prisoners fled. A day before, another of the most dangerous criminals from the Guayaquil Regional Prison, José Adolfo Macías, alias Fito, had escaped, whose whereabouts are still unknown.
During these months, Pico had hidden in a cocoa farm in the Puerto Quito sector, 160 kilometers from the capital. Like every drug trafficking boss, his security ring started from the community, where he had “bell ringers to warn of any strange movement,” explained Freddy Sarzoza, director of Police Investigations. The uniformed officers entered through the dirt road and the thick vegetation that surrounded the 22-hectare farm where Pico lived with all the comforts. His security responded with bullets against the uniformed officers who finally managed to arrest him along with four other people, including his sister. All have criminal records for different crimes related to kidnapping, extortion and murder.
Pico was an important target. He has 21 judicial proceedings against him of which he has only served a couple of years of his sentences in prison because he took advantage of the corruption of the judicial system to obtain his freedom. But the trigger for him to be arrested a few days before his escape was that the State Prosecutor, Diana Salazar, who is popular for the corruption cases she investigates on the links between politics, justice and drug trafficking, publicly denounced in a hearing that Pico had threatened to make an attempt on her life. The next day, the ringleader was arrested.
For the president, the capture of the criminal is the result of the security policy and fight against corruption that his Government is applying. “Thanks to the bravery of Ecuadorians, dignity has been restored to our country. We are experiencing difficult situations, but I am certain that we are going in the right direction,” the president wrote in X, with a photo of him in which he carries his own image: a cardboard replica, which was the symbol of the campaign of the. Social networks have been the only means that he has chosen to communicate after Sunday's plebiscite.
According to the Ministry of the Interior, a 27% reduction in violent deaths has been achieved since the declaration of the state of emergency in January. “The security issue has improved, it has improved so much that compared to other weeks, we had only 99 deaths. That is still a lot, but we are going down that slope,” said Mónica Palencia, Minister of the Interior.
The Government is now preparing the ground in the Assembly to send the bills to apply the legal reforms that were approved with the popular consultation on Sunday. Of the nine questions that won the yes vote, five must necessarily go through the Legislature. Four of those must be dealt with in the Justice commission, led by Correismo, with which it maintains a tense relationship after the capture of Jorge Glas in the Mexican embassy and which accuses the president of keeping him kidnapped in La Roca prison.
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