2024-01-20 05:05:00
QUITO.- It is Wednesday, January 10, the first day that children and young people throughout Ecuador once again have virtual classes because the insecurity situation in the country reached such a level that the authorities have considered it prudent to suspend in-person classes. In the afternoon, our young children nervously ask us if we believe that Fito – the alias of José Adolfo Macías, the feared leader of the Los Choneros gang who escaped from prison at the beginning of the year – will be close to where we live, and what what we will do if he tries to enter our apartment. That is not going to happen, we tell them to (try to) reassure them, that there are many police officers looking for him and rather he must be hiding or even outside the country. Although my wife and I have tried to keep them isolated from the news of the last few days, it was obvious that our children would end up finding out what is happening or, to be more exact, forming in their little children’s heads an idea closer to what could happen. in a comic or a television series, where a villain keeps an entire country in suspense. But in this case he is not one, but hundreds or perhaps thousands.
One day before, on Tuesday the 9th, a dozen criminals (some of them minors) stormed the TC Televisión facilities in Guayaquil and forced the channel’s workers, at gunpoint, to broadcast their feat live. . In Guayaquil itself and in other cities, mainly on the Coast, with a coordination that could not have been a coincidence and that made us understand that we had entered unknown territory, other attacks took place, including assaults, moderate intensity explosions and rudimentary car bombs. left next to service stations and, luckily, they did not explode. That Tuesday afternoon, President Daniel Noboa elevated the state of exception (at this point, nothing exceptional for Ecuadorians, who have become accustomed to curfews) to that of “internal armed conflict.” From that day on we are officially at war. But the enemy, whether called “organized crime”, “criminal gangs” or “narcoterrorism”, is something that we have not yet been able to fully identify and that many Ecuadorians persist in underestimating, convinced that the “iron fist” will be enough to defeat it.
That same Tuesday, after being glued to the television or cell phones, watching the news in disbelief, the entire country was a hive of nerves: businesses closed in the middle of the afternoon, public transportation began to become scarce and, despite that, traffic collapsed. because everyone wanted (we wanted) to return home as soon as possible to be with our loved ones. In addition to decreeing that classes be virtual, the authorities requested that, where possible, work in subsequent days also be remote. Violence has become our new pandemic.
We cannot say, however, that insecurity spread in a matter of weeks, like Covid. The outbreak of criminal violence in Ecuador began at least three years ago. And we do not know how long, probably with the connivance of those who came to control all the functions of the State, it was incubating. The truth is that the country stopped being that “island of peace” that it considered itself and became the most violent in the region, with a homicide rate that exceeded 40 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023.
At first, the violence was concentrated mainly in prisons. Since 2021, there have been massacres between prisoners belonging to criminal gangs fighting each other for control of different territories, with increasingly atrocious images. And just as the atrocity was increasing, so was our tolerance for that kind of news. It had to be something very savage, like the massacre of 119 prisoners at the end of September of that year, for the news to occupy the front page of the newspapers for more than a day. Then the number of hitmen began to multiply (also most of the time between members of rival gangs, or at least that’s what we want to think to feel less vulnerable) and assaults. And a new type of crime emerged: the now famous “vaccines”, that is, the bribes that criminals demand from merchants, farmers or transporters, to let them work. (In mid-2023, in a stand-up show, a trio of comedians said that during the pandemic, Ecuadorians were happy to receive the vaccine and that now, however, our greatest fear is that they will vaccinate us.) However, , the level of violence has not been homogeneous throughout the country, it has been felt especially on the Coast, where there are cities with homicide rates that have exceeded 100 per 100,000 inhabitants and where the ports from which the drug. In Quito and other cities in the Sierra, the situation, although it has deteriorated, has not reached these extremes.
Which does not mean, by any means, that they are free of violence: on August 9 of last year, in the commercial area of Quito and in broad daylight, the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, known for his denunciations of cases of corruption that They were mainly committed to Correism, he was murdered at the exit of a rally with his sympathizers. The entire country was shocked, stunned, afraid. In a matter of minutes, the video of the murder went viral on social networks and through WhatsApp messages. My wife and I saw them in the kitchen, away from the kids so as not to expose them to something so violent and, above all, so that they wouldn’t see us cry. Not only because of Villavicencio, but also because we knew that from that to a bomb in a public place (or, who would have imagined it, to the storming of a television station), it was a step away. A few weeks later, seven suspects in the Villavicencio crime were murdered in prison. If with that there was still someone who was not convinced about the level of infiltration of the mafias in the State, the recent presentation of the “Metastasis” case by the Attorney General, Diana Salazar, must have opened their eyes: judges, prosecutors , police, even the president of the Judiciary Council (the institution that appoints judges) involved in a case that affects Correismo (a party that, without any shame, is determined to remove prosecutor Salazar from her position) and that It would prove how a criminal structure was formed to manipulate Justice.
Last Wednesday, already in a state of “internal armed conflict,” with police and military patrolling the streets, prosecutor César Suárez, in charge of investigating the assault on TC Televisión and some major cases of corruption, was murdered in Guayaquil, again at full daylight. Paraphrasing García Márquez, an ingenious tweeter wrote: “The day they were going to kill him, César Suárez got up at 5:30 in the morning to wait for the ship in which the bishop arrived.” Indeed, in today’s Ecuador the murder of Suárez was the Time.news of a death foretold.
In a country like this, which before the outbreak of criminal violence already suffered the onslaught of violence that presented itself as “social protest” despite having included attacks never before seen on the civilian population and the media (marginal comment : At this point it is difficult not to suspect that at least a part of those who participated in the protest days of October 2019 and June 2022 did so so that the criminal gangs would not stop profiting from the fuel subsidy, the review of which was the pretext that was used to literally burn down Quito); In a country like this, he said, should we continue trying to isolate our children from this type of news or, on the contrary, should we confront them with reality so that they know from a young age where they had to grow up? How can we avoid transmitting to them that shameful outburst of “kill all the criminals!” to which we are being dragged, even knowing how primitive it is and the dangers it entails for the survival of our already fragile democracy? If we had somewhere to emigrate to, should we take the opportunity and leave so that our children do not normalize (or be exposed to) violence, permanent fear, hate speech? Or should we rather stay and fight for Ecuador? Is there a way out for a country where the political class and society in general are not willing to reach agreements even in the current circumstances, for example to finance a State that is already bankrupt and now, furthermore, at war?
Last week, at the bottom of this rollercoaster of emotions that the daily life of Ecuadorians has become, I told a dear friend – whose children are studying their university degrees abroad – that despite what How painful it must be to be an empty nest, I was envious that she had her children outside the country. Not only did he understand me, but he added something that gave me goosebumps: “To my children outside and, although it sounds ugly, to my dead parents. What a relief that they didn’t have to experience this.”
Economist and writer, directs the Development Studies Corporation, based in Quito
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