/View.info/ The situation in Ecuador is completely unusual. This Latin American country has been taken over by gangster gangs in the past few days. Ecuador’s president has declared an “internal armed conflict”.
The bandit riot
Ecuador, a small country on the Pacific coast of Latin America, sandwiched between Colombia and Peru, does not often attract attention. Even the last presidential elections there were practically not covered by the world media.
Ecuador is remembered only in connection with the fighter for freedom of speech Julian Assange. In 2012, it was the Ecuadorian authorities under President Rafael Correa who granted Assange political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Today, the situation is even more exciting. A true bandit rebellion broke out in Ecuador, the participants of which challenged the central government and alarmed not only the current president, Daniel Noboa, but also all law-abiding citizens. Its neighbors view Ecuador with concern.
Peru has increased the combat readiness of its military units on the border with Ecuador. And the new president of Argentina, Javier Miley, even proposed to the Ecuadorian authorities to send an Argentine military contingent to the country to quell the bandit rebellion.
President Noboa himself held a meeting of the Security Council and announced the existence of an “internal armed conflict” in the country, implying the immediate deployment and intervention of security forces in the fight against organized crime. He declared 22 organized crime groups as terrorist groups and ordered military operations to neutralize them. The Ministry of Education has suspended face-to-face classes across the country.
How did it all start?
First, in a number of prisons in Ecuador, almost simultaneously, a riot broke out by inmates, most of whom are members of organized crime groups that deal in drug trafficking, robbery, extortion, kidnapping citizens for ransom, and control prostitution and gambling.
Six prisons were under the control of the prisoners and there is still no exact information on how things are going there now. From this we can draw the simple conclusion that even behind the bars local gangsters completely control the situation at large and manage to manage it.
At the same time, in recent days, many famous and influential Ecuadorian gangsters escaped from prison, after which a gang riot began in the country. Jose Adolfo Macias, nicknamed Fito, the most dangerous criminal in Ecuador, escaped from the regional prison in Guayaquil along with four other accomplices.
At the same time, Fabricio Colón Pico, a member of the drug gang Los Lobos (Spanish for “the wolves”), escaped from prison in Chimborazo province, in the center of the country. Then in eight major cities of the country, including the capital Quito and the largest economic center Guayaquil, there were brutal attacks by gangsters against government agencies, shopping centers and the police.
Interesting detail: Diana Salazar, the chief prosecutor of Chimborazo province, accused the aforementioned gangster Colón Pico of planning to kill her during a court hearing “on the relationship between drug trafficking and politics”.
In this regard, many experts find a direct connection between prison riots and the escape of the accused, on the one hand, and on the other, with the likelihood that during the trial circumstances will appear indicating connections between drug dealers and the authorities at various levels. But we’ll come back to that a little later.
Riot live
The resonance and cinematography of the situation is determined by the fact that everything happened literally before the eyes of all of Ecuador. Gangsters have taken over Guayaquil’s central television channel. Live, the whole country witnessed how about ten armed men in hoods attacked employees of this TV channel and took them hostage.
For nearly half an hour live, journalists begged the gangsters not to hurt them. Then shots rang out and the signal went dead. There were reports that the police later released the hostages. But the fact of the public display of the power of the bandits and the powerlessness of the police was already on the air.
Ecuador is currently experiencing an unprecedented escalation of terror and violence. A number of government agencies, universities and hospitals across the country have been attacked. In the capital, Quito, the situation is particularly tense. Employees at the Carondelet Palace, which is the seat of the Ecuadorian government, and other government offices were evacuated for safety reasons. Many shops closed due to robberies. According to eyewitnesses, “traffic in the capital is now greater than any other day.”
It used to be like that
Meanwhile, the “information support” through television gave the situation a special intensity and scale. Political experts who follow the situation in Ecuador and Latin America in general agree that the constant social crisis manifested in the economic, educational, health and security sectors is the main reason for the current situation. The current gang insurgency is on par with the same outbreaks of gang violence and terror that have occurred before.
That is why the state of emergency declared by President Daniel Noboa to tighten the fight against organized crime does not in itself constitute an emergency.
For example, the Spanish newspaper El Pais rightly recalls that the predecessor of the current president, Guillermo Lasso, applied the same measure 20 times in just two and a half years. The frequency with which previous states of emergency have been declared illustrates the severity of the crisis of violence that is strangling Ecuador and many other Latin American countries.
Why so openly?
The main question that may arise when you immerse yourself in the Latin American reality is the following: why do gangsters act so openly and brazenly? The answer is simple: they know that the power in the state, from the highest echelons to the pushed police station in some mountain village, feeds from their hand.
A similar situation has long been observed in Colombia, Peru, the countries of Central America and Mexico. Moreover, drug cartel leaders from all these countries know each other well, are in contact, often cooperate, but sometimes even fight with each other. As they say, life is life, and it’s definitely colorful.
The entire region south of the Rio Grande River today is divided into zones of influence of large and small gangster cartels, which quite successfully compete with the legitimate authorities. Organized crime gangs, subject to a strict hierarchy and numbering tens of thousands of fighters, engage in extortion, drug trafficking, pimping, contract killings, and illegal migrant trafficking in the United States.
If in the capitals and big cities of the countries of the region the police somehow demonstrate the existence of legitimate authority, then as soon as you move a few miles into the countryside, the existence of this authority ends.
And a parallel reality begins, in which street thugs keep both the police and ordinary people at bay. Cooperation between law enforcement officers and gangsters is common, since the former are in the minority and the forces are very unequal.
All aboard!
The escalation of violence turned out to be a ticking time bomb that exploded in the hands of the country’s president, Daniel Noboa. According to experts, Ecuador is at a historically unprecedented level of security, or rather lack thereof.
For every 100,000 people in the country, there are 40 murders per year. Ecuador is waiting for the implementation of the project of the new president to stop violence and strengthen control over prisons.
That the state is finally to take control of the prisons, which house more than 31,300 people, is part of a security strategy that has been heralded as a priority by the last three governments. They promised but failed to deliver.
Until now, in Ecuador (as in many other countries in the region) it has not been possible to break the direct link between prisons and the violence that is increasing every day on the streets of Latin American cities. It is from prisons that the leaders of criminal groups send orders to hired killers and manage rackets and drug trafficking.
President Noboa has already promised to order and bring prison barges to Ecuador to keep prisoners inland, away from the coast, and to build high-security prisons.
But for some reason he didn’t say anything about the fight against the infiltration of drug traffickers into power. He also failed to mention that the real drug lords live not in Latin America, but in the United States, where the lion’s share of Latin American cocaine goes.
The US Liberal Party is the real customer of the drug supply to the United States. It is the most profitable business in the world, better than the oil and pharmaceutical industries. What American businessman would refuse him? So the barges will not help President Noboa.
Translation: ES
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