The Government of Daniel Noboa has drastically reduced homicides in the country, which partly explains the high popularity it enjoys (more than 80%).
Ecuador has gone from having 40 homicides a day to 12, which represents a reduction of more than 60%.
However, extortions and kidnappings have increased.
The payment of extortions has doubled and in all of 2023, 138 kidnappings were recorded, and only between January and March 2024 there were already 38. The majority occurred in Guayaquil, according to police figures, which is the most violent city in the country. country.
Noboa, a young businessman heir to a banana empire, came to power without anyone expecting him, defeating Correismo.
He soon said that he would apply Nayib Bukele's successful recipes against crime in El Salvador.
After an onslaught by organized crime in January, he took the army to the streets and in light of the data on homicides the shock provoked has worked.
In addition, his Government carries out a DNA registry in prisons of prisoners who are not provided with sufficient information about what this entails, as EL PAÍS revealed on Saturday.
That same day, the Government acknowledged in a statement that it was carrying out these tests, but according to his version it complies with the protocol and informs the inmates.
However, this newspaper has documented that this is not the case.
Due to the increase in kidnappings, stories are being produced like those of Francisco, who with his face covered, with his shirt and his hands tied, realized that he was not alone in the small dilapidated room, made of wood and cane where they had left him sitting in floor.
He was kidnapped, in some neighborhood of Guayaquil, where he rules a state of exception so that thousands of soldiers patrol the streets.
Two hours earlier he had been detained while he was riding in his car on a main avenue in the south.
“Two guys on a motorcycle stood next to my window and pointed at me, they asked me to get off, and when I tried to take the phone to alert my wife, two others were pointing at me on the passenger side,” Francisco recalls in detail. that day.
Locked in that room, unable to see around him, he listened to the breathing of two other men next to him sitting on the floor near him.
No one dared to speak for fear of angering his guard, a boy with a gun who was at the door.
Francisco was trying not to lose track of time, when the subjects, with all kinds of weapons, entered the room to make the man on his right record a video.
He could feel how nervous he was by how he moaned and breathed heavily, like someone walking to the guillotine.
The first thing he did when he spoke was ask for forgiveness from the family, says Francisco, who recognized from his voice that he was a young man of about twenty years old.
“Apparently he was involved in selling drugs,” he adds, because the last thing the boy said was that he took some drugs, and resigned to the end he was going to have, he said goodbye.
“I felt how they stabbed him several times and then dragged him out of the room,” says the man who fortunately survived.
Then he learned that the boy had been kidnapped for about three weeks, and the other man in the room had been in that place for more than a month.
“He was an elderly merchant who was being extorted from his family to deposit money in exchange for releasing him alive,” says Francisco.
The man was released while he continued waiting.
Until his turn came.
About five hours had passed since he was kidnapped, when the armed men entered again.
They took off the shirt that was covering his face and in front of him he had a cell phone.
He was on a video call.
“He's not it!” shouted the one on the line.
“They were wrong.
They were looking for a guy with the same model and color of car, but with blue windows, and mine doesn't have blue windows,” says Francisco.
The mistake could worsen the situation or free him from kidnapping.
“I told them, look at me carefully, I'm not the one you're looking for, I'm a worker,” Francisco tried to negotiate, “they took off my clothes to check me for tattoos and whether I belonged to a gang and they left me back on the floor,” he says. the man, who was told that if he behaved well they would spare his life.
At night they took him out of the room, put him on a tricycle (a motorcycle to which they adapt seats and cover it with canvas) and left him on the edge of Perimetral Avenue, which borders the outskirts of Guayaquil and where they throw out the kidnapped and dead.
Francisco was alive.
Extortion totals 1,518 cases so far in 2024, compared to 787 in the same period last year.
These figures are only those that have been reported.
There are entire neighborhoods, businesses and people who do not report for fear of reprisals and lack of trust in justice and the Police, since some of their members have been arrested for being involved with the gangs that are dedicated to these crimes.
The police did not find out about Francisco's kidnapping.
After being released, the kidnappers extorted him, asking him for $2,500 to return his vehicle that had been dismantled.
He paid the criminals, they gave him the car and he did not file a complaint.
In the streets of Guayaquil there is relative calm.
“We don't hear so many shootings or deaths,” says José, who lives in the Flor de Bastión sector, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city.
The perception is that there are not so many deaths due to the presence of the military.
But “organized crime has been embedded in the country for three decades and it is difficult to destroy it with military actions alone,” explains Mario Pazmiño, former Director of Intelligence, who analyzes that what has happened in Ecuador is only a small part of what the organized crime, which has the power to mutate and reorganize quickly.
“Because in all these years it has had a penetration in the government, control, financial, judicial and social system.
That is difficult to change in a short time,” he adds, although he believes that long-term public policies can be planted.
The problem is that the Government still does not talk about it.
For the Police, the crimes of kidnapping and extortion are problems that not only occur in Ecuador but throughout the region.
“Criminal organizations saw in this crime a possibility to strengthen illegal economies to maintain these terrorist gangs within the country,” said Byron Ramos, head of Dinased in an interview on the Teleamazonas media.
But going out on the street is still an act of bravery in Guayaquil, where he lives with the uncertainty of being kidnapped, extorted or assaulted.
Follow all the information from El PAÍS América on
and
X
, or in our
weekly newsletter
.