Ecuadorian authorities foiled an attack using a drone equipped with explosives against the maximum security prison in the Ecuadorian port of Guayaquil on Thursday, reported the so-called Security Block, made up of the police and armed forces to fight drug trafficking.
The device, which was placed on the red roof of the prison, exploded, destroying part of the roof.
The Security Bloc later informed the press that it had carried out a “controlled explosion” of the device after an assessment of how to neutralise the act.
“The action of the Security Block prevented an attack that was intended to be carried out at the Guayas Deprivation of Liberty Center No. 3, known as La Roca, with the aim of disabling this center,” the organization initially indicated in a statement.
He added that an intervention by police, military and prison guards “identified and thwarted the action of a drone with explosives that was flying over” La Roca, which is part of a large prison complex in Guayaquil (southwest Ecuador) and has capacity for a hundred high-profile inmates.
There are mafia bosses and politicians accused of corruption, as well as former vice president Jorge Glas, who was arrested last April when police raided the Mexican embassy in Quito, where he was seeking asylum. The incident led to the breakdown of relations between the two nations.
In September 2023, the public forces detonated in a controlled manner another drone loaded with explosives that landed on La Roca.
Ecuador’s prisons, which have become centers of criminal operations, have been under military control since January, when President Daniel Noboa declared the country in internal armed conflict in the face of an onslaught by drug traffickers.
“We will confront each and every one of their constant attempts to regain control of the penitentiary system and the country,” the Security Bloc said in a message included in its Thursday note and addressed to the “mafias” operating in the country.
Also imprisoned in that prison was the Ecuadorian Adolfo Macías, alias “Fito,” head of the criminal group Los Choneros, who escaped from prison and remains missing.
Macías had threatened to kill presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, who ended up being assassinated by Colombian hitmen in August 2023 when he was leaving an electoral rally in northern Quito.
According to independent research centres, the Choneros have a force of around 8,000 men. Allied with Mexican and Colombian cartels, this group competes with around twenty other organisations for the drug trafficking business.
In 2021, there had already been another attack with a drone equipped with explosives against the large penitentiary complex in Guayaquil, which has been the scene of bloody massacres due to clashes between inmates of drug trafficking gangs, resulting in more than 460 deaths since 2021.
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