Ecuador decrees a state of emergency in Guayaquil after the attack in a popular neighborhood

Crime in Ecuador has raised the tone of its threats to the state.

This weekend a bomb in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Guayaquil has left five dead, 17 injured and several homes destroyed.

The attack adds to the wave of growing violence for two years that has broken the tranquility of the citizenry.

Six months ago two bodies appeared hanging from a bridge, while the number of murdered has only increased.

The first response of the Government to the attack at dawn in Cristo del Consuelo, a neighborhood in the Guayaquil suburb, has been to decree a state of emergency throughout the city.

This is the third time in the last year.

It is a "terrorist act", declared the Minister of the Government, Francisco Jiménez in reaction to mid-morning on Sunday.

The head of the Interior, Patricio Carrillo, has described it as a "declaration of war on the State."

The measure, which will remain in force for the next 30 days, forces the Government to revive the state of emergency in the city in order to mobilize a joint task force between the police and the Army.

In the first half of the year, Ecuador already had 2,116 violent deaths, when in all of 2021 the registered homicides were 2,496.

In the province of Guayas, to which Guayaquil belongs, the rate of murders is almost double that of last year.

"Those who seek to cause chaos in the city through terrorist acts will be punished," Diego Ordonez, the new Secretary of Public Security, appointed at the beginning of the month, justified at the same press conference.

Despite what was announced, the decree that must collect the details of the restrictions has not been made public at the time of publication of this article, late on Sunday.

Of the five deceased that the explosion has left in a low-income neighborhood, south of the city, three died immediately and two did so in the hospital due to their injuries.

The Minister of the Interior assured that homemade explosives with "highly lethal" chemicals were used, which also contained shrapnel and metallic elements to increase the impact.

The shock wave reached 50 or 70 meters, according to Carrillo, and left a mark of one and a half meters and 40 centimeters deep.

The first testimonies assure that subjects on a motorcycle appeared at dawn in the area of ​​the attack and after shooting several times, they threw a sack that later exploded and left what is known as Calle 8 with a scene of debris, fallen cables and dust.

The official investigation indicates that the attack was directed at two characters related to the Los Tiguerones criminal organization, linked to drug trafficking in Ecuador: alias Cucaracha, a resident of that neighborhood, and alias Junior.

However, the Minister of the Interior has lamented that the majority of the wounded who have been treated at the health center -and already discharged- have preferred to remain silent and not testify about what happened.

"After 10 hours of the event and six hours after the $10,000 reward was announced, we did not find a single call," the head of the Security portfolio also admitted.

His ministry still lacks formal autonomy and resources, despite the fact that President Guillermo Lasso decided last March to separate the functions of the Interior from those of the Ministry of Government to reinforce the national security strategy, precisely in the midst of a political crisis and insecurity due to recurrent clashes in prisons.

It is not the first attack with explosives in Ecuador in recent years, which has registered attacks against police barracks or military detachments, but it is the first threat of such magnitude against residential areas.

“What we are experiencing is not a problem that this government has generated.

We have seen it with a growing trend for a long time," said Carrillo, referring to the growing number of murders in the country that the Government attributes to the gangs' fights for territory and a response against the State for its fight against crime. drug trafficking

This weekend, the same as the attack, three tons of drugs were seized.

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