six people are riddled with bullets in the north of Guayaquil

Six people were murdered inside a home in the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil in what the police preliminarily considered a settling of scores between gangs linked to drug trafficking.

Police said in a statement on Monday that the incident occurred between midnight and early morning in the sector called Desarrollo Comunal del Norte of that port city, located 270 kilometers southwest of the capital, when three people broke into the house and shot at the occupants of the site.

He specified that the agents who went to the place, where drugs were also found, found casings that correspond to rifles.

Ecuador has become the scene of a struggle between national and international criminal gangs, especially from Mexico and Colombia, dedicated to drug trafficking and associated crimes such as extortion, kidnapping and assassination. These gangs maintain disputes over the routes for the export of narcotics to the United States and Europe.

Ecuador is facing an acute crisis of violence that began in 2021 with massacres and clashes in prisons that have left more than 400 prisoners murdered.

In parallel, disputes between criminal gangs have unleashed violent episodes in the streets. The rate of violent deaths in 2022, according to official figures, was 25.32 per 100,000 inhabitants, equivalent to 4,603 murders, while in 2021 there were 2,464 violent deaths.

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