Preventive detention and other measures for 17 accused of organized crime in Ecuador

This Sunday, Ecuador’s justice system issued preventive detention and other alternative measures for 17 arrestees, including provincial judges, officials and lawyers, in a case being investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office for organized crime to favor criminals through judicial rulings.

The Attorney General’s Office reported on its account on the social network X, formerly Twitter, that a judge of the National Court of Justice accepted its request and determined the detention of 14 people, house arrest and use of an electronic device for two other elderly people and the prohibition of leaving the country for a pregnant woman.

The withholding of the bank accounts of those linked for a global amount of one million dollars was also ordered.

The 17 suspects were arrested the day before in several operations in different provinces of the Andean country, among them judges from the judicial units in the cities of Santo Domingo, Huaquillas and Milagro.

These new defendants join 14 other people involved in the case called “Plague” which, according to the prosecution, investigates a corruption network that handled the sale of favorable sentences, release warrants and other legal actions especially for members of organized crime groups.

According to prosecutor Diana Salazar, the leader of the organization is a lawyer who is a fugitive from justice and who is also being investigated in another case involving a drug trafficking boss murdered in 2022, Leandro Norero.

During the hearing, which lasted from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning, the prosecution explained, for example, that a judge from Santo Domingo, whom it identified as Jorge Eduardo A., granted freedom to a collaborator of the leader of the Lobos, Fabricio Colón Pico, in exchange for the payment of 70,000 dollars.

The criminal group Los Lobos, considered one of the largest drug trafficking organizations in the country and linked to Mexican cartels, was sanctioned in early June by the United States Treasury Department with the blocking of its assets and interests in the North American country.

Colón Pico, for his part, is detained after being directly accused by the prosecutor of planning an attack against him. He has a criminal history of more than 30 years and 17 arrests, according to authorities.

Other judges would have operated in the same way for payments ranging between $30,000 and $60,000, as reported by the prosecution during the hearing.

Ecuador is experiencing a wave of violence that authorities attribute to the operation of organized crime groups linked to drug trafficking and transnational organizations.

Since January, the government declared that the country is experiencing an internal armed conflict and named 22 organizations that it classified as terrorists, including Los Lobos, as military objectives.

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