2024-01-22 01:25:39
This Sunday, the Ecuadorian police captured 68 people who were supposedly trying to take over a health center in the coastal province of Guayas to protect an injured member of their organization who was admitted during the early hours of the morning. At a time when Ecuador is waging a war against drugs with thousands of soldiers deployed, Colombians and Ecuadorians announced that during this weekend two semi-submersibles loaded with drugs were intercepted in their respective territories.
clandestine rehabilitation center
“We neutralized alleged terrorists, who were trying to take over the facilities of a health home in Yaguachi, Guayas,” said the Ecuadorian police on the social network organization, the same one who was admitted as an injured person during the early hours of the morning,” the authority added.
During the police operation, firearms and drugs were seized. A clandestine rehabilitation center “where” the alleged members of the gang were hiding was also raided, the entity said. “Within this supposed rehabilitation center, it has been the command center for all these people,” local police chief Julio Camacho told the press, who reported that “a brothel” also operated in those facilities.
Hundreds of clandestine rehabilitation centers, which do not have adequate conditions for patient care, were closed by the Ecuadorian health authorities. Others were the scene of tragedies, such as when 18 people died in 2019 after being trapped in a fire. Several of these clandestine centers have been linked to local criminal gangs, while others were classified as kidnapping and torture centers by human rights organizations.
Two “narco-submarines” seized
During a police and military intervention at the Litoral Penitentiary, weapons, ammunition and drugs were seized. Through a video published on social networks, the National Police showed the objects that were confiscated, while the prisoners were concentrated in the prison yard. These interventions have been carried out in all the country’s prisons since they were intervened by the uniformed officers as part of the internal armed conflict decreed by President Daniel Noboa.
In addition, the Colombian Navy reported in a statement the seizure of the “first semi-submersible of the year” in that country. The narco-submarine that was intercepted in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, near the port of Buenaventura, in the west, was carrying 795 kilos of cocaine. The three people who were on it were arrested. On Saturday, the Ecuadorian Armed Forces had announced the seizure of another semi-submersible with almost three tons of cocaine.
Like the one seized in Colombia, the narco-submarine is gray and measures 15 meters long. The operation was carried out about 60 kilometers off the coast of Esmeraldas, northwest of Ecuador. According to a statement from the Ecuadorian Armed Forces, the operation was carried out in collaboration with the police of that country and the Colombian Navy.
A UN report indicates that 2022 was a record year for drug crops in Colombia. The cultivation of coca leaves in that country, raw material for cocaine production, increased by 13 percent to 230 thousand hectares of crops. Although it does not produce cocaine, Ecuador, one of the 11 countries along with El Salvador, Haiti and Liberia that officially adopted the dollar as legal tender, is one of the main drug trafficking corridors on the continent and functions as a collection and transit point. of cocaine coming from Colombia.
A total of 2,763 people were detained in Ecuador during the first 13 days of internal armed conflict against organized crime, of which 158 were arrested for alleged terrorism. The figure emerges from a report by the Ecuadorian government published this Sunday on the police and military operations carried out in the national territory under this new scenario, where 22 organized crime gangs have been considered terrorist groups and non-state belligerent actors.
Between January 9 and 21, Ecuadorian authorities also claim to have killed five alleged members of these gangs now classified as terrorists, while two police officers were murdered. In the midst of the state of emergency, with the military in charge of security, prosecutor César Suárez was murdered on Wednesday, who was in charge of the investigations of the armed raid on the TC television channel on January 9, in Guayaquil.
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