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Guayaquil (Ecuador) (AFP) – Desolate streets and closed businesses: fear reigns this Wednesday in Guayaquil, the main port of Ecuador, after the violent onslaught of drug trafficking groups, which left six dead and led the government to mobilize the military under the state of emergency.
In this city of 2.8 million inhabitants, activity was scarce. People rushed around looking from side to side after Tuesday’s unusual wave of attacks, in retaliation according to authorities for the transfer of 1,000 prisoners from a prison controlled by drug gangs.
Five policemen were killed and in the last few hours a man died from a gunshot wound to the head, bringing the number of victims to six from the attacks with explosives and bullets directed at police facilities, gas stations and a health center.
“There is a bit of fear in the streets, and everything is empty as if it were Saturday afternoon in the center of Guayaquil, without much movement of cars,” Jorge Arguello, head of a publishing company, told the AFP news agency. .
The 36-year-old man acknowledged that he was afraid to leave his house this morning when he saw that motorcycles were circulating, which he associates with gangs of criminals and hitmen.
In small groups, police and military patrol the city. Joint operations at dawn left 28 detainees, a dozen firearms, including rifles, ammunition and explosives.
gunpowder smell
Tuesday’s offensive extended to the neighboring town of Durán and the oil port of Esmeraldas, on the border with Colombia (north), where the control of the Public Force also extends.
“You can clearly see in the sequence of events, more than 18 attacks during the day (Tuesday), that this has been deliberately programmed to cause terror in the Ecuadorian population,” said President Guillermo Lasso, in statements released on Wednesday by the Secretary of Communication.
In the south of the city, Elizabeth, who preferred to omit her last name, noted that “there is hardly anyone on the streets, but it’s scary to go out like this.”
The 37-year-old woman was barely recovering from the scare that happened at dawn, when residents of the La Sopeña neighborhood warned of a car bomb.
“We called ECU911 and they came right away, they deactivated it and it didn’t get any worse, but on the pedestrian it smelled like gunpowder,” he said.
On Tuesday in total there were 18 attacks. “Drug crime feels uncomfortable and expresses its discomfort with violence,” Lasso said when declaring a state of exception in the provinces of Guayas (whose capital is Guayaquil) and Esmeraldas, which includes an eight-hour curfew from 9:00 p.m. local.
The measure, with which the military were mobilized, will be in force until December 16. Classes were also suspended in Guayaquil and Esmeraldas.
“Metastasis of Violence”
Drug trafficking took flight in recent years in Ecuador, until then a transit point for illegal shipments from Colombia, mainly.
Organizations opened an internal market for the sale of drugs and multiplied shipments of tons of cocaine from Guayaquil and other ports. The gangs dominate several penitentiaries, converted into a “safe” center of their operations due to the inability of the State to assume control.
For the former head of military intelligence, Mario Pazmiño, in the country there is “criminal governance, in which organized crime has begun to displace the State from certain territorial spaces.”
The dispute between the gangs inside the prisons has left around 400 dead since February 2021, most of them in massacres with bodies shot, incinerated and mutilated with machetes.
“That is going to spread, there is going to be a metastasis of violence at the national level, beginning with the main cities, where these organizations already have certain enclaves and projecting themselves to other cities that are perhaps not contaminated,” Pazmiño said.
In 2021, the country seized a record 210 tons of drugs, the vast majority of which were cocaine. So far this year, seizures total 160 tons.
