Guayaquil, the Ecuadorian city where the terror of organized crime spreads

Operation of the Armed Forces in Guayaquil.FERNANDO MENDEZ (AFP)

The Ecuadorian government's promise of a strong hand and of winning the war it declared against organized crime two years ago, after the third prison massacre that claimed the lives of 200 prisoners, changed with the recent announcement by President Guillermo Lasso to authorize possession and carrying weapons to civilians for personal defense, calling everyone to combat.

"We have a common enemy, crime, drug trafficking and organized crime," said the president in a message to the nation on April 1, which has sparked all kinds of criticism.

"This is part of the militaristic view of security that the president has been implementing," says analyst Luis Carlos Córdova, who, in his opinion, "now transfers responsibility to civil society."

The president's decision comes when the country is facing the worst insecurity crisis in its history.

In 2022, intentional homicides reached a record number of 4,603, which meant 83% more than in 2021 and ranked the country as one of the most violent in the Americas with a rate of 25 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants.

The focus of this violence is concentrated in Guayaquil, the most important coastal city, which also drives a large part of the economy because it has five of the eight ports in the country and which have historically attracted significant internal migration seeking opportunities for a better life. .

But the city's public policies have not been able to respond to population growth, and what they have done is exclude neighborhoods from public works, and "they have become a bunker for criminal groups," says Aquiles Álvarez, elected mayor of Guayaquil.

At least ten criminal gangs dispute the power of territories with blood and fire, through extortion, kidnappings, robberies, assassinations perpetrated by hitmen and terrorist attacks.

They paint their insignia on the walls to sow terror in the population that has changed their dynamics of life.

“Now we spend [time] locked up in our houses,” says Virginia Cedeño, a mother of four who lives in the Isla Trinitaria neighborhood, a depressed sector in the south of the city, where most of its inhabitants live from informal work, in the absence of opportunities.

The sector was formed by invasions, to which over the years the Municipality brought basic services such as water, electricity and sewerage.

At best, the streets are asphalt.

The lack of planning makes these places a mass of concrete, without vegetation or parks, which grew from the shores of the estuaries, the arms of the sea that lead to the ports.

They never imagined that their location would become a strategic factor for criminals who are dedicated to drug trafficking using cargo containers.

On Wednesday night, 25 armed youths on motorcycles went with paint to mark the walls of houses on Isla Trinitaria.

“LK, CZ”, they wrote on the walls of several blocks.

“It means Latin Kings, and the other letters must be from the name of the guy who won the war.

Now the neighborhood belongs to him, ”says Virginia, who describes that the struggle has bled the neighborhood dry, she also took the life of her husband, who was assassinated eight months ago a few meters from the house.

The shootings that constantly take place in the sector have almost normalized, so weapons have ceased to be something strange.

"I would use a weapon if my children's lives were in danger," adds the mother, who has seen corpses on the porch of her house, and has suffered the consequences of bomb explosions thrown by criminals without distinguishing themselves.

Although she reflects on the legal consequences: "The problem is that criminals are protected by justice in this country."

There are reasons enough for Virginia's fears, when both the government and the judicial system allowed the freedom of the main leader of one of the most dangerous gangs in Ecuador.

Through a favorable report from the prison management and a precautionary measure granted by a judge, alias JR, sentenced for seven murders, went to his house with an electronic shackle.

He published on social networks the parties in brothels and the weapons used by his security team.

After they tried to assassinate him, he removed the device and vanished.

He is now a fugitive from justice again.

For now, Virginia does not have the economic possibilities to access a weapon, nor ammunition, nor the training course that requires permission to have it legally.

The Ministry of Defense is the one that must deliver the certificates of proficiency in weapons, the Ministry of Health is in charge of psychological tests and a registration system must be implemented that will be under the Joint Command of the Armed Forces.

But there are doubts that the certificates that are issued to have weapons are obtained on a regular basis, given the recognized corruption in the institutions.

Even the United States Government withdrew the visa of several generals for alleged links to drug trafficking.

Last November, in the police warehouse of the Modelo barracks, in Guayaquil, they discovered that 150 weapons were missing, some of which have been found at crime scenes.

Another transcendental event occurred in 2018, when the offices of the Army Command in Quito were raided to dismantle a network that trafficked Army weapons and sold them to alias Guacho, leader of the Colombian dissidents known as the Oliver Sinisterra Front.

“If these conditions exist in the country,

The Ministry of Health has also been embroiled in scandals for irregularly issuing 2,300 disability cards in 2020, among them, to politicians, academics and even assembly members, who took advantage of the tax reduction benefits granted to bearers of this document.

Lasso's announcement was accompanied by the declaration of a state of emergency -the tenth in terms of security since he took office-, with a curfew, to restrict the movement of people and militarize areas where violent crimes increase without achieving contain them with the public force, which does not have basic implements such as bulletproof vests, helmets, weapons.

In some cities, local governments provide fuel for patrol cars.

The Government has promised on several occasions the purchase of tools to reinforce the Police, modernize and implement technology, but "the purchasing processes are bureaucratic, and I must respect the law," Lasso stated.

The president will celebrate two years in power on May 24 and the inputs arrive in drops.

The government's hypothesis is that the insecurity crisis has its origin in the growth of drug trafficking in the country and the weakening of the National Police and the Armed Forces during previous governments.

For Daniel Pontón, a researcher at the IAEN Security and Defense School, this problem dates back 20 years with Plan Colombia.

"The country's strategy was to sweep the conflict towards the border, this internal displacement generated forced migrations to Ecuador that were related to criminal activities," he adds.

This is how the first province to be co-opted by drug trafficking was Esmeraldas, which borders the departments of Nariño and Putumayo, Colombia, where 42% of the cocaine exported to European and North American markets is produced, according to the report of the United Nations Office on Drugs (UNODC).

In Esmeraldas, commercial and social activities are closed before nightfall, it is considered a "silenced zone", where journalists must be in bulletproof vests, helmets, and have police or military custody to document what is happening there.

The scenarios were reconfigured with the disintegration of the large Colombian cartels and the entry of Mexicans into the drug distribution process.

Thus, Ecuador went from being a country of transit to one of collection and distribution.

There is evidence that behind the 11 prison massacres, where 420 prisoners have been cruelly murdered, and the murders in the streets are the Mexican cartels of Sinaloa, Jalisco Nueva Generación and the Albanian mafia that is in charge above all of the shipment of drugs to Europe.

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