Ecuador, in coordination with neighboring Colombia, has dismantled a criminal group that trafficked in weapons and explosives in the country, President Guillermo Lasso announced on Wednesday.
An operation carried out in six Ecuadorian provinces and
"strategic points in Colombia made it possible to dismantle a gang that engaged in the production and trafficking of weapons and explosives",
explained Guillermo Lasso on his Twitter account, reporting on the arrest of more than twenty people in the two countries.
"A great job"
Preserved in recent decades from the guerrillas in Colombia, Ecuador has become a stage on the route of cocaine, manufactured in Colombia and then sent to the United States or Europe.
The two countries share a common border of 586 kilometers.
The rise of drug trafficking has resulted in an explosion of violence in Ecuador (25 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, against 14 in 2021), particularly in the port city of Guayaquil, on the Pacific coast.
Colombian police announced on Monday that they had seized 33 rifles and a machine gun belonging to a breakaway faction of the defunct Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC, Marxists) guerrillas.
“Two of the operations were coordinated with the Colombian government.
This is what we get when we work together, a great job for the security of the country,”
said Guillermo Lasso.
The Ecuadorian president, who did not say whether the cases were related, said among the dismantled group's arsenal were
"rifles, carbines, shotguns, pistols and more."
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“This weaponry is used to fuel violence in the streets, support terrorism and implicate Ecuador in international arms trafficking,”
he added.
Located between Colombia and Peru, the world's largest cocaine producers, Ecuador seized around 200 tonnes of the drug in 2022, mostly cocaine, compared to an annual record of 210 tonnes in 2021. Seizures were 92 tons in 2020.