The president of Ecuador, a country under siege: ‘We are at war’

Violence has overwhelmed Ecuador these days, a country that until five years ago was among the safest in the region. The president, Daniel Noboa, the son of the country’s richest businessman, 36 years old and with only 50 days in office, is facing an unprecedented crisis. With prisons as their center of operations, organized crime has killed police and prison officials in the last 72 hours and has tried to attack hospitals and police stations. Noboa has deployed the army in the streets and has asked it to shoot down criminals, whom he considers terrorists. “We are at war,” the president said.

Scenes of violence are taking place throughout the country, but are concentrated in Guayaquil, the most dangerous city. Its citizens shelter from street shootings and looting in shopping malls and street-side stores. Dressed as police, criminals set up roadblocks and kill or kidnap the occupants of cars. On Tuesday, the country witnessed 13 hooded youths storming the set of a public media outlet, TC Television, live on air; the transmission was not stopped as they threatened journalists with guns, grenades and what looked like dynamite. Barbarism turned into reality show.

The Ecuadorian gangs, associated with the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG, from its Spanish initials), both from Mexico, have infiltrated the state by buying off police chiefs, generals, judges and prosecutors. Their top leaders control the drug routes leading to the United States, as well as the main ports and borders, from prisons converted into luxury suites complete with bars and swimming pools. They have officials in key positions on their payroll, and those who they don’t, live in constant fear of being assassinated. One way or another, the gangs end up in control.

Noboa has so far shown no signs of strong leadership. His role has been secondary, leaving the limelight in press conferences to high ranking army officers. His most significant move was to declare “an internal armed conflict” and decree a curfew, something that other presidents have also instituted in the past. In an interview on Radio Canela this Wednesday, he noted that the state is facing “terrorist groups” made up of more than 20,000 people. “We are not going to give in, we are not going to let society die slowly,” he added.

During the election campaign, he assured that he had a plan to retake control of the prisons, which included confining the most dangerous prisoners in barges out at sea 75 miles from the coast. At this time the alleged plan has not been implemented and no further details of it are known. José Adolfo Macías Villamar, alias Fito, considered the most dangerous criminal in Ecuador and leader of the gang known as Los Choneros, and Fabricio Colón Pico, a member of Los Lobos, took advantage of this vacuum of authority to escape from prison last weekend. The prison doors were flung wide open to them, without the prison directors lifting a finger. The former are associated with the Sinaloa drug traffickers and the latter with those from Jalisco. The escapes of these two important leaders gave rise to the wave of confrontations that took place in the streets.

Returning 1,500 Colombian prisoners

The president says he is willing to pardon the main leaders of these organizations so that they can face the deployed military directly. “They don’t dare,” he reckons. He says that in his sights are officials in the payroll of organized crime, who are also considered terrorists and would face a prison sentence of between 10 and 13 years. To give an example, a judge had ordered Fito’s release on six occasions, when there were no grounds for it. Noboa has also inherited from the previous president, Guillermo Lasso, an immense debt that restrains him from deploying a larger operation. Regardless, he claims to have the support of Israel and the United States. He also has the support of the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, to whom he has not responded too politely. He has proposed to return 1,500 Colombian prisoners serving sentences in Ecuadorian jails, most of them for drug trafficking. If he refuses to take them in, he says he will release them at the border.

Ecuadorians are witnessing terrifying scenes these days. In a video uploaded to Instagram, three hooded men are seen asking the president to initiate a dialogue with organized gangs. At their feet, subdued, nine prison officers, face down and with their hands on the back of their necks. “[If these talks do not take place] we are going to kill all the officials, inside and outside the prisons,” says one of the criminals. He then randomly grabs one of the nine and hangs him with a rope suspended from the ceiling and tied to an iron door. As the man is dying, another official stands up and addresses the camera: “Mr. President, don’t let this slaughter continue with us.” The hanged man’s corpse swings in the background like a pendulum.

Experts fear that the fight against criminal structures could take an authoritarian turn, as has happened in El Salvador. “We are facing criminals who use terrorist tactics, but that does not mean they are terrorist groups,” says Luis Carlos Cordova, an analyst specializing in security. Taking on terrorism as the enemy was already done by Lasso in April last year, a measure that, according to the expert, “can be described as desperate and could get out of control.” In his opinion, this declaration of internal conflict could lead to the perpetration of false positives, a term coined in Colombia to describe the killing of innocent people who are passed off as criminals.

For Cordova, the fact that the drug traffickers have infiltrated the state, that they have camouflaged themselves in it, makes the army’s presence useless. It is known that at least one general, a handful of colonels and 13 officers worked for Los Lobos. “The criminal structures could end up being the ones that oversee the security plan itself and this could give rise to the birth of an authoritarian state, a regime of terror,” he concludes.

Ecuador, meanwhile, remains in chaos. This is a challenge to the state on a scale greater than that faced by other countries such as Colombia and Mexico in the past. Prisons remain in the hands of gangs, which control the main levers of power, including politics, as evidenced by the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio. The decomposition of institutions has been continuous and threatens to establish a narco-state in a country that until recently seemed immune to the tribulations of its neighbors. The nation faces a challenge of biblical proportions.

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