Authorities Concerned with Violence Increase in Ecuador
A series of targeted killings in Ecuador demonstrates how violence among the country’s criminal gangs is continuing to spiral out of control.
The most recent case came on May 5, when four suspected hitmen dressed as police stormed into a hospital in Guayaquil and fired sixteen bullets into a female patient. The assault team had mistakenly deemed her as the target of the assassination attempt.
A week earlier, on April 28, a prominent defense lawyer, Harrison Salcedo, was gunned down in broad daylight as he drove through an intersection in northern Quito.
One of Salcedo’s clients was José Luis Zambrano, alias “Rasquiña,” the leader of Ecuador’s largest gang, Los Choneros. Zambrano was shot dead at a restaurant in the city of Manta last December. According to sources within the Ecuadorian authorities, prior to his murder, Zambrano had been involved in a leadership struggle with two other members of the gang, according to Ecuadorian police.
Past January, Efraín Ruales, a popular TV presenter was murdered in a drive-by shooting as he was heading home in northern Guayaquil. Authorities suspect that the presenter, who was said to have received death threats for speaking out against corruption, was killed by hired gunmen.
In March, a suspect in Ruales’ murder claimed that he and other individuals had been hired to scare the presenter but that the situation had turned deadly.
The assassinations have coincided with unprecedented levels of prison violence in Ecuador, fueled by escalating gang disputes at the start of 2021.
And in 2020, Ecuador saw the second-highest growth in homicide rates in Latin America and the Caribbean, with Guayaquil the most violent city in the country. The country closed the year with 1,357 murders, up from around 1,188 in 2019. Disputes between criminal gangs were a major contributor, both in major cities and along the Peruvian border, where groups fought for control of contraband and human smuggling.
The increase in targeted killings appears to stem from gang tensions that had been limited to prison disputes but have now spilled into the street in spectacular fashion, as the gangs have taken to using tactical violence outside of jail.
In 2008, faced with rising violence and increasing membership in gangs, Ecuador allowed gangs to keep functioning as important social structures, encouraging their members to pursue job and training opportunities. This was believed to be a major factor in an abrupt drop in the homicide rate by 2016.
But that progress may now be coming to a halt as gang clashes in cities like Guayaquil drive up the national murder rate.