The spate of horrific attacks across Ecuador this week would once have been unthinkable, but this kind of bloodshed is now almost routine in the Andean country as gang violence escalates to unprecedented levels. Late on Tuesday, President Guillermo Lasso announced a 21:00 curfew under a new state of emergency in the affected regions of Guayas and Esmeraldas. He called the violent incidents “a declaration of open war” and said he was “ready to act harshly”. He added that soldiers and police raided prisons and seized weapons, ammunition, explosives and phones. Analysts say criminal gangs bolstered by lucrative ties to Mexican drug cartels are using terror tactics to intimidate authorities and citizens as the country of nearly 18 million people teeters on the brink of becoming a narco-state. Ecuador’s Interior Minister Juan Zapata said the two police officers who were shot on Tuesday “died at the hands of organized crime.” Two more police officers were injured in a separate attack on a police station. “This year has been very sad and tragic for the national police, Zapata said. “With these two cases we now have 61 police heroes who have fallen in the line of duty.” The latest spate of attacks is believed to have come in response to the transfer of inmates from Guayaquil’s Litoral prison, the scene of the worst prison massacre in the country’s history last year, which left at least 119 dead. The latest bloodshed comes just months after a deadly bombing killed at least five and wounded 17 people in Guayaquil, marking an escalation of terror tactics against civilians and prompting a fourth state of emergency in the violence-wracked city. “In some areas, the state has been displaced,” said Colonel Mario Pazmiño, a former director of Ecuador’s military intelligence service, referring to parts of Guayaquil and Ecuador’s Pacific coast. “We are talking about criminal dominance with this new escalation in the level of violence. More than 400 prison inmates have been killed – many burned alive or beheaded – since February 2021 in an explosive increase in killings as rival gangs battle for control of lucrative cocaine-trafficking routes to the US and Europe. Ecuador – which lies between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest cocaine-producing countries – is a strategic smuggling route because of its long Pacific coastline and large shipping and fishing fleets. Analysts say the uptick in violence began when local criminal gangs began competing to work with rival Mexican drug cartels Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation. In the first eight months of this year, there were 2,785 violent deaths in Ecuador, a 10-year record that has already surpassed the total number of murders in 2021, according to police data. About two-thirds of these deaths were in coastal areas. The rate almost doubled in 2021 to 14 per 100,000 inhabitants and reached 18 per 100,000 between January and October this year. Luis, 42, a plumbing parts dealer in Guayaquil, the coastal city that has been at the epicenter of the violence, said he was afraid to leave his home because criminals hang out on his street corner. “You can’t go out of the house at night. It’s really hard,” he said. “Every day there are more criminals, you don’t even want to catch a taxi,” he added. He was also suspicious of the police, believing, like many Ecuadorians, that the institution had been infiltrated by drug trafficking. Regarding the government’s response, he replied: “It’s really lukewarm. Trying to impose a curfew, [the criminals] he’ll just laugh in your face.”
