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Six people were killed and six others injured after gunmen opened fire at a restaurant in the resort town of Montañita, in Ecuador’s southwestern coastal province of Santa Elena, the prosecutor’s office said on Sunday. In Ecuador, the rates of violence have become alarming, while insecurity problems related mainly to drug trafficking fuel social unrest.
The episodes of crimes continue in Ecuador. Six people were killed and another six were injured in the coastal city of Montañita, on the Pacific coast.
An investigation into this “armed attack” is underway, according to the prosecutor’s statement on his Twitter account. In addition, “the removal of the corpses and the collection of evidence” have already been carried out at the place of the massacre, the Prosecutor’s Office reported.
“Percuted shells of firearms, three cell phones and substances subject to control (not yet quantified)” are, among others, the evidence collected at the site of the event, he added.
The massacre occurred on Saturday night in a lively neighborhood of the coastal city. At the moment, the Prosecutor’s Office has not provided details about the identity or age of the victims.
“We heard the noise: bang, bang, bang, and people were shouting: Run, run, it’s shots!” a woman who was in the neighborhood at the time of the shooting told the AFP news agency and did not want to reveal your identity.
Police commander Fausto Salinas, for his part, confirmed to a local newspaper that one of the fatalities in the attack was known as “Morro” and that he had a previous judicial record. It is suspected that the target of the attack was this individual, possibly related to the criminal gang ‘Las Águilas’.
Is about the second massacre in a city on the country’s Pacific coast this week. On Thursday, gunmen entered a funeral home in the neighboring port of Manta and opened fire on those attending a funeral vigil, killing four and injuring eight, according to prosecutors.
In mid-April, in the province of Esmeraldas, in the northwest of the country and near the border with Colombia, around thirty armed men opened fire at a fishing port, killing nine people. Two weeks later, gunmen fired at people watching a soccer game in a car garage, killing ten people and wounding three others, including a five-year-old girl.
The worst escalation of violence in years
Sandwiched between Colombia and Peru, the world’s top cocaine producers, Ecuador is experiencing the worst escalation of violence in its recent history. Mass murders of civilians are becoming common, and drug-related crime has led to almost double the homicide rate between 2021 and 2022going from 14 to 25 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Authorities attribute the violence to conflicts between gangs and cartels over control of trafficking routes along the Pacific, a strategic corridor for shipping drugs to the United States and Europe.
Thus, drug traffickers, some linked to Mexican cartels, would be waging a war in the streets and in the prisons of the country, where mass murders also have claimed nearly 420 lives since February 2021.
On May 3, the Ecuadorian government decreed that it will authorize military and police operations against what it qualifies as “terrorism,” as part of a strategy to stop the wave of violence. The authorities have decided to classify as terrorist acts, the actions attributed to organized crime, especially the massacres perpetrated by armed individuals in the cities of the country’s coast.
But according to the Ecuadorian opposition, the government’s response has been unsuccessful. President Guillermo Lasso, who faces great discredit from the population and who has dissolved the Parliament that sought to remove him, is accused of carrying out a security policy based on repeated declarations of a state of emergency and militarization of the fight against drugs, considered by many to be ineffective.
AFP and EFE
