By Stefano Pozzebon, Ana Maria Canizares, Aliza Kassim Khalidi and Hande Atay Alam, CNN
Ecuador is safer amid a rising tide 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.
Homeland Security Secretary Diego Ordonez vowed Thursday that the government will recover Ecuador’s penitentiaries — sites of repeated bloodshed — and roll out other anti-crime operations, following an emergency council meeting.
At least five Ecuadorian police officers have been killed in bomb attacks, Ecuadorian police leader Fausto Salinas said at a press convention Tuesday.
Salinas said that that same day there were 3 detonations in the city of Esmeraldas: two car bomb attacks and one in the vicinity of the police unit of the network. He added that the wave of attacks began as a reaction to the transfer of dozens of detainees to other prisons in the country.
President Lasso has continually accused organized drug gangs of violence in prisons and in Ecuador, which is a key transit point in the direction that takes cocaine from South America to the United States and Asia.
Ecuadorian prisons are chronically overcrowded. In July 2021, then-prison leader Eduardo Moncayo told local media that the Litoral prison is the most overcrowded in the country, with more than 9,000 inmates in a facility planned for 5,000.
The criminal formula is on high alert since September 2021, with clashes between criminals with automatic weapons and even grenades.
More than three hundred inmates were killed in criminal violence in 2021, according to figures from Ecuador’s SNAI Penal Service, and in May, a criminal in the north of the country left more than 23 dead.
Ecuadorian government ministers blamed the attacks on the government to combat organized crime.
“We’re not going to let our guard down, we’re not going to lower police morale. The strength of the state cannot yield to organized crime. The police cannot seem overwhelmed,” Interior Minister Juan Zapata said. said Tuesday morning.
According to Ecuador’s Penal Service, SNAI, the explanation for the transfers that began on Tuesday is to “reduce overcrowding, infrastructure and security conditions. “to the country’s criminals.
Defense Minister Luis Lara said the attacks were carried out in reaction to the “business resolution of the National Government to recover the prisons and eliminate the drug industry in the country. “
He said the violence in Guayas and Esmeraldas is related to drug trafficking and organized crime.
Some 1,400 members of the Armed Forces have been deployed in Guayaquil, and will join this week, he added.
“Criminal teams will not be able to take control of the country,” Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Holguin wrote in a tweet Tuesday. “All of our president Guillermo Lasso, our armed forces, the police. It will have to be a national crusade. International has been key in this crusade.
El-CNN-Wire™
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