Ecuador is on heightened security amid an escalating wave of violence that has left several police officers dead and forced President Guillermo Lasso to declare a 45-day state of emergency in the provinces of Guayas and Esmeraldas.
National Security Minister Diego Ordoñez pledged on Thursday that the government would regain control of Ecuador’s penitentiaries – sites of repeated bloodshed – and implement other anti-crime operations, following an emergency council meeting.
At least five Ecuadorian police officers have been killed in explosive attacks, Fausto Salinas, Ecuador’s police chief, announced during a press conference on Tuesday.
Salinas said three explosions were reported in the city of Esmeraldas on the same day: two car bombings and one on the outskirts of the Community Police Unit. He added that the wave of attacks began in response to the transfer of dozens of prisoners to other prisons in the country.
President Lasso has repeatedly blamed organized drug gangs for violence inside prisons and across Ecuador, a key transit point on the route that brings cocaine from South America to the US and Asia.
Ecuador’s prisons are chronically overcrowded. In July 2021, then-prison chief Eduardo Moncayo told local media that the Litoral penitentiary was the most overcrowded in the country, with more than 9,000 inmates in a facility planned for 5,000.
The prison system has been on high alert since September 2021, clashes in prisons with automatic weapons and even grenades.
More than 300 inmates were killed in prison violence in 2021, according to data from Ecuador’s SNAI prison agency, and in May a prison riot in the north of the country left more than 23 dead.
Ecuadorian government ministers blamed the attacks on the government’s effort to tackle organized crime.
“We are not going to reduce our patrols, they are not going to reduce the morale of the police. The power of the state cannot yield to organized crime. The police cannot appear shocked,” Interior Minister Juan Zapata said Tuesday morning.
According to Ecuador’s prison service, SNAI, the reason for the transfers that began on Tuesday is “to reduce overcrowding, improve infrastructure and security conditions.” SNAI also tweeted that 1,002 prisoners were transferred from Ecuador’s most violent Guayaquil prison to prisons across the country.
Defense Minister Luis Lara said the attacks were carried out in response to the “firm determination of the national government to regain control of the prisons and eradicate the drug business in the country”.
He said the violence in Guayas and Esmeraldas is linked to drug trafficking and organized crime.
About 1,400 members of the Armed Forces have been deployed to Guayaquil and more will be added this week, he added.
“What happened in Guayaquil and Esmeralda is devastating. Criminal groups will not be able to conquer the country,” Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Holguin wrote in a tweet on Tuesday. “All support to our president Guillermo Lasso, to our Armed Forces, to the Police. This should be a national crusade. International support was key to this crusade.”
