The Ecuadoran army and police on Thursday launched an operation in a vast penitentiary complex in the port city of Guayaquil, the nerve center of a drug war between the government and powerful criminal groups.
Video released by the army showed hundreds of soldiers pouring into the prison, from which gang boss Adolfo Macias, alias “Fito,” escaped last week.
The jailbreak sparked a government crackdown and, in turn, fierce retaliation from the criminal groups who have made Ecuador a hub for the global export of cocaine from neighboring countries.
“Army and police personnel are carrying out a new intervention” to “control the external and internal perimeters of the penitentiary center,” the army said in a press release.
The operation comes a day after a prosecutor was gunned down in his car in Guayaquil, the latest in a series of high-profile assassinations in Ecuador.
“We have apprehended two suspects involved in the murder of prosecutor Cesar Suarez … after investigative steps that allowed us to identify the alleged involvement in the criminal act,” Police Commander General Cesar Zapata said on social media.
He said evidence against them included a rifle, two pistols, a firearm charger and two cars.
Since last week, drug cartels have been waging a bloody campaign of kidnappings and attacks in response to a government crackdown on organized crime, prompting President Daniel Noboa to declare the country in a “state of war.”
Once considered a bastion of peace in Latin America, Ecuador has been plunged into crisis after years of expansion by transnational cartels that use its ports to ship drugs to the United States and Europe.
The latest outburst of violence was sparked by the discovery of a prison escape by one of the country’s most powerful narco bosses, Jose Adolfo Macias, known by the alias “Fito.”
In response, Noboa imposed a state of emergency and nighttime curfew, but the gangs hit back, threatening to execute civilians and security forces and taking hostage dozens of police and prison officials, since released.
On Jan. 9, attackers stormed the TV station, firing gunshots and forcing staff to lie on the ground as a woman could be heard pleading: “Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot.”
Police entered the studio after about 30 minutes of chaos, arresting 13 assailants, many of them teenagers.
The attack, seen live by many, caused widespread panic across Ecuador, with people leaving work early to seek shelter at home.
Prosecutors targeted
Attorney General Diana Salazar said the murdered prosecutor, Suarez, had received death threats from the powerful Los Lobos (The Wolves) gang, whose boss, Fabricio Colon, also escaped from prison last week.
Suarez had also investigated cases involving the infiltration of the mafia into the judicial system, and corruption scandals linked to the purchases of medical equipment during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Prosecutors have become a particular target of the gangs.
In June last year, Leonardo Palacios was mowed down in the town of Duran, near Guayaquil, and in 2022, two prosecutors and a judge were shot dead in other parts of the country.
Anti-graft and anti-cartel presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was killed in a barrage of automatic gunfire after a campaign speech just weeks before elections last year, won by Noboa.
