Ecuador is facing a fresh wave of violence that has rocked the South American country, with President Daniel Noboa launching a military crackdown on drug gangs that experts say could take years.
The crisis spilled onto the airwaves when armed men interrupted a live television broadcast Tuesday, threatening and intimidating employees. No one was killed and 13 assailants were arrested, but the incident stunned much of the region. Meanwhile, more than 100 prison staff were being held hostage by criminal groups in at least six prisons, and authorities were searching for a jailed gang leader who escaped last weekend.
The rising violence inside the once relatively peaceful Ecuador has stunned longtime observers who are concerned about how the government will respond.
“This is one of the most dramatic shifts in South American politics in recent years,” said Max Cameron, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia who studies Latin America.
How did Ecuador get here?
Violence in Ecuador has been rising since 2022, with multiple deadly riots breaking out inside the country’s prisons that authorities say are being sparked by gangs battling for control.
The government says 8,008 people lost their lives due to violence in 2023, more than double the figure in the prior year. Officials point to the growing reach of international drug trafficking gangs that move cocaine produced in South America.
Ecuador is sandwiched by Peru in the south and Colombia to the north — both major cocaine production centres that are now using Ecuador as a smuggling route, according to government officials and independent reports.
During a snap election campaign called last year amid growing pressure to combat the violence, anti-corruption presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated. Another wave of violence followed before Noboa, 36, was sworn in as president last November.
Noboa has been touting his “Phoenix Plan” for security, which includes the establishment of a new intelligence unit, tactical weapons for security forces, new high-security prisons and reinforced security at ports and airports.
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The government has said the outbreak of violence this week was in response to Noboa’s security plans.
What happened this week?
Police said on Sunday that Adolfo Macias, the leader of the Los Choneros criminal gang, had disappeared from the prison where he was serving a 34-year sentence. Authorities are trying to track him down.
Multiple prison riots broke out shortly after the government acknowledged Macias’s apparent escape, with gang members taking more than 100 prison staff hostage.
Noboa declared a 60-day state of emergency on Monday, including a nighttime curfew and military patrols across the country, including prisons.
In an updated decree published on Tuesday afternoon, Noboa said he recognized an “internal armed conflict” in Ecuador and identified several criminal gangs as terrorist groups, including Los Choneros, ordering the armed forces to neutralize the groups.
The decree came shortly after the takeover of a live broadcast at TC Televisión, where viewers saw armed men hold journalists at gunpoint. Police managed to clear the building and arrest the group without any deaths.
Violence also spread to the streets on Tuesday, with two police officers killed in Guayas province, where Guayaquil is located. Seven police officers were also kidnapped around the country, though three have been freed.
The government said nearly 330 people, including the TC Televisión suspects, had been arrested for alleged acts of terrorism as of Wednesday afternoon. Security forces across Ecuador guarded hospitals, public transit and newsrooms. The government ordered teachers and students to hold classes remotely until Friday.
What happens now?
Noboa told a radio station Wednesday that the country was “at war” with the drug gangs he called “terrorist groups.” He estimated that some 20,000 crime gang members are active in Ecuador.
Just how Noboa plans to conduct his “war” on the gangs was not immediately clear. But Ecuadorians said a model was already available elsewhere in Latin America.
“President Noboa must do what El Salvador did,” Humberto Poggi del Salto, a businessman in Guayaquil, told the Associated Press. “The situation has gotten out of control. And it is because of lack of extreme measures.”
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Two years ago, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele suspended constitutional rights to wage an all-out war on violent gangs. Sharp declines in criminal violence since then have made the 42-year-old leader highly popular at home and across Latin America.
Yet mass arrests of tens of thousands of suspected gang members — many of them believed to be innocent — and the opening of a controversial “mega-prison” have fuelled accusations of widespread human rights abuses in El Salvador.
Cameron, the UBC professor, says Noboa’s government must focus on a long-term strategy that includes strengthening its own governance and rooting out corruption. Jumping straight to a hardline response suggests the Ecuadorian president has “already lost the battle.”
“When the criminal violence gets to this point, you have to do something about it,” he said. “But you also have to look at why it’s possible for this violence to happen in the first place and how these groups are spreading. And that is not going to be resolved with a 60-day state of emergency.”
Whether the state of emergency and resulting military response lasts beyond those 60 days will determine the future of Ecuador for years to come, he added.
“I think this is what we might call a kind of critical juncture,” he said.
— with files from Global News’ Mike Drolet, the Associated Press and Reuters
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