2023-12-17 06:00:52
A country victim of criminal violence, even sometimes against politicians. The UK’s honorary consul in Ecuador’s port city of Guayaquil, Colin Armstrong, has been kidnapped in the southwestern province of Los Rios, police said on Saturday.
The diplomat, who is also a farmer, was kidnapped in the early hours of the morning from his farm in Baba canton. In a message broadcast on X (formerly Twitter), the police indicated that “operational and investigative work” was underway in Los Rios.
Neither the UK Embassy nor the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry have commented yet.
A skyrocketing rise in violence
In recent years, Ecuador has become a center of operations for foreign and local drug cartels that impose a regime of terror with murders, kidnappings and extortion.
Ultra-violent gangs control the prisons and streets of many cities and ports, where violence has skyrocketed. Since 2018, the national homicide rate has quadrupled, from 6 to 26 per 100,000 people.
VIDEO. “Every day there are settling of scores”: gang war terrorizes Ecuador
Located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s largest producers of cocaine, Ecuador seized a record quantity of 210 tonnes of drugs on its territory in 2021.
At the end of an electoral rally in Quito last August, presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, then second in the polls, was shot dead as he left the sports hall, announced Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso. . A state of emergency had been declared.
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