At least two dead in new brawl in Ecuador prison

Clashes between gangs returned to the Guayaquil prison, where two prisoners died on Wednesdayhours after a wave of “terrorist attacks” carried out by drug traffickers killed six people in the Ecuadorian city.

The wave of violence that began on Tuesday with more than a dozen attacks with explosives in police stations, gas stations and health centers in Guayaquil caused that on Wednesday the streets of the city woke up desolate and with soldiers patrolling, after the country’s president, Guillermo Lasso, declared a state of emergency.

“Yesterday we were deliberately attacked by sabotage and terrorist attacks orchestrated by drug criminals. Those attacks they sought to generate fear and chaos, but they have not succeeded,” President Guillermo Lasso said on a radio and television network.

In the midst of the clashes in the prison, which also left six injured, a group of soldiers pointed their rifles towards the interior of the prison, AFP confirmed.

Late at night, the body in charge of administering the prisons (SNAI) reported that “members of organized crime groups promote disturbances” in the Guayas 1 prison, where the day before another confrontation left two minor injuries.

The transfer of 1,000 prisoners from that prison, controlled by drug gangs, unleashed the crisis in Guayaquil and the neighboring town of Durán, in addition to the province of Esmeraldas, on the border with Colombia (north).

On Tuesday two car bombs exploded near a gas station and a police station in the port of 2.8 million inhabitants, paralyzed by fear.

“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 Argüello, head of a publishing company, told AFP.

The offensive led Lasso to declare a state of emergency for 45 days in the provinces of Guayas, whose capital is Guayaquil, and Esmeraldas, which includes an eight-hour curfew starting at 9:00 p.m. local time.

In small groups, police and military patrol Guayaquil. Joint operations from dawn leave 53 detainees and the confiscation of firearms, including rifles, ammunition and explosives.

“Our hands will not shake and they know that those who are on the side of the criminals will have the repudiation of all Ecuadorians,” said the president.

Fear reigns in Guayaquil, where 1,200 homicides have been reported so far this year, 60% more than the same period in 2021, according to official data.

“I see police cars at night but what I do is hide. It scares me that there will be a shootout right there because they (the uniformed men) are looking for them” the drug traffickers, Andrea Aguilar, a 38-year-old saleswoman, told AFP.

She avoids going near the police station in the La Alborada sector, where one of the car bombs detonated on Tuesday.

“This is terrible, we have put bars on all sides of the citadel and we thought that this way we were safer,” he lamented.

On Tuesday in total there were 18 attackswhich forced the suspension of classes in Guayaquil and Esmeraldas.

Public shows were also interrupted in Guayaquil for a week.

Drug trafficking has taken flight in recent years in Ecuadoruntil then a transit point for illegal shipments from Colombia, mainly.

Organizations opened an internal drug sales market and multiplied shipments of tons of cocaine from Guayaquil and other ports.

The gangs dominate several penitentiariesconverted into a “safe” center of its operations in the face of the State’s inability to assume control.

“Ecuador is a dollarized country with a corrupt and permeable justice system. It is the perfect place for criminal activity,” lawyer Xavier Flores, a human rights specialist, told AFP.

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 over the power of the gangs in 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, starting with the main cities, where these organizations already have certain enclaves and projecting themselves to other cities that are perhaps not contaminated,” Pazmiño told AFP.

In 2021, the country seized a record 210 tons of drugs, mostly cocaine. So far this year, seizures total 160 tons.