2024-01-11 08:28:00
Ecuadorian security forces, deployed in response to the state of emergency declared in the country José Jácome|José Jácome | EFE
“The lukewarm governments are over,” promises President Noboa, after militarizing the country to stop riots in prisons and violence in the streets.
11 ene 2024 . Updated at 7:28 a.m.
Ecuador has not yet emerged from the shock caused by the day of terror and chaos experienced on Tuesday in the face of violent actions perpetrated by criminal gangs, to which the president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboahas declared “war” on them.
He armed assault and broadcast to the TC Television channel, the burning of vehicles, the kidnapping of police officers and the riots with hostages in various prisons in the country have led Noboa to make a controversial and unprecedented decision to consider organized crime groups as belligerent actors against the stability of the State. And by decreeing the “internal armed conflict”, the criminal gangs operating in Ecuador began to be considered “terrorists” and military objectives to be “neutralized”, so the first day under this scenario resulted in “329 terrorists” detained. and five killed, while two police officers were also killed and one injured.
Activity on the streets has been very limited, with school classes suspended, many people sheltered in their homes, and a lot of security around the presidential election. Carondelet Palace.
Meanwhile, a total of 139 prison officials, including guards and administrative staff, are still held in at least five prisons where prisoners have rioted as a measure of protest against the heavy-handed policy that Noboa wants to implement in Ecuador’s penitentiary system. Among those detained there are 125 prison guards and 14 administrative officials in the prisons of Cuenca, Azogues, Napo, Ambato and Latacunga.
In the latter, located 70 kilometers south of Quito, the prisoners swarmed on the roofs of the prison complex and even carried banners demanding “peace”, as did their relatives concentrated outside, as Efe was able to verify.
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At the moment Noboa is intransigent in negotiating the freedom of prison staff. “We are doing everything possible and impossible to bring them back safely, but we cannot stop a war because of that, because the State is at war,” he remarked. “We are in a state of war and we cannot give in to these terrorists,” said Noboa in his first public intervention since the outbreak of this crisis, his first as president after taking office last November.
This wave of violence It occurs in the face of the apparently imminent intention of the Noboa Government to isolate the leaders of criminal gangs before taking them to two maximum security prisons whose construction it plans to present this Thursday, with a design similar to those used in Mexico and El Salvador.
The prisons are in Noboa’s sights after more than 450 prisoners have been murdered there since 2020 in a series of prison massacres due to clashes between rival gangs, a violence that has spread to the streets to make Ecuador one of the most violent countries in the region.
Warned of this plan, José Adolfo Macías escaped from prison on Sunday Issuethe boss of The Chonerosthe largest criminal gang in Ecuador and one of the most violent, for which Ecuador offers a reward for its capture.
Also included in the reward program was Fabricio Colón Pico, a leader of the criminal gang ‘Los Lobos’ accused of allegedly planning an attack against the attorney general, Diana Salazar, and who escaped on Monday from the Riobamba prison after a riot where A total of 32 prisoners escaped.
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The canal robbers go to prison
At the same time, the Prosecutor’s Office prosecuted the 13 detained for the assault on the television channel’s facilities on Tuesday in Guayaquil for terrorism, among whom there is a Venezuelan and two minors. The eleven adults, including the Venezuelan, were ordered to be placed in preventive detention, while the two minors, aged 15 and 17, will be placed in a detention center while the investigations continue.
The fear still remains in the group at the time when these people, hooded and armed, burst into the television studio and pointed guns at the staff there, all broadcast live nationally.
“We were afraid to die”
«I never thought I would experience what happened yesterday in my life. It was disastrous for all the canal workers. “We were all afraid of dying or that a colleague would be killed or injured,” creative producer Carlos Vega told Efe. One of the camera operators can’t get it out of his head that “the criminals put a stick of dynamite in the chest of our colleague José Luis Calderón.” “We all saw it in Ecuador.”
The dialogue prevented it from ending in a bloodbath, according to General Víctor Herrera Leiva, commander of the Ecuadorian Police. With the dialogue “they sought to get them to desist from using weapons, because inside the canal they had two long weapons, a submachine gun and three explosive devices,” he explained.
Filed in: Ecuador Terrorism
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