By La Jornada editorial on January 11, 2024
Ecuador entered a maelstrom of violence and decomposition of the rule of law on Sunday. On that day, Adolfo Macias, alias Fito, the kingpin of the country’s largest organized crime group, escaped from the regional prison in Guayaquil, the country’s economic capital and most populous city. The escape was particularly scandalous because it occurred hours before his transfer to a maximum security penitentiary, which for the umpteenth time demonstrated the criminal control over the prison and justice system. In fact, Fito was already in La Roca prison, where he was to be taken back at the end of the week, but a judge ordered his return to the regional prison, despite the fact that it was public knowledge that this center was his fiefdom and from where he directed all the operations of his gang.
President Daniel Noboa reacted to the capo’s escape by decreeing a state of emergency for 60 days so that the armed forces could enter the prisons and put an end to the widespread self-government that prevails there. However, this measure, which includes a curfew from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., did not prevent the escape of another criminal leader, Fabricio Colón Pico, arrested just last Friday.
Nor could it prevent a wave of violence that included the kidnapping of at least seven policemen, explosions against a police station, the house of the president of the National Court, as well as burning vehicles. Yesterday, the situation went completely off the rails with a series of acts that openly defied the authorities: the University of Guayaquil and the Teodoro Maldonado hospital in the same city were invaded by criminals seeking to take hostages, there was looting in the historic center of the capital, a shooting near the government palace, and the studio of a television station was assaulted by a group of armed hooded men during a live broadcast.
Noboa doubled the stakes for an armed escalation by classifying 22 transnational organized crime groups as terrorist organizations and belligerent non-state actors, ordering the military to neutralize them and declaring the existence of an internal armed conflict. The development of the events is disturbing as it confirms Noboa’s tendency towards the concentration of power, authoritarianism and the suspension of human rights as central axes of his strategy, elements that the president himself had anticipated when he revealed that he would follow the model of his Salvadoran counterpart, Nayib Bukele.
In addition to being terrible news in terms of constitutional guarantees, the militarization of the government is questionable in the Ecuadorian context: Noboa’s predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, used and abused the state of emergency without resulting in an improvement of public security; on the contrary, between 2018 and 2023 the homicide rate went from 6 to 46 per 100,000 inhabitants, an increase of 700 percent. Likewise, the futility of the two “”supermaxima”” and “”supermega”” security penitentiaries, commissioned to the same Israeli company that designed Bukele’s infamous mega-prison, can be predicted. It is not only that it is ethically unacceptable to confine human beings in cages created to humiliate and debase them, but it will be a waste of resources in a country where judges release captured criminals and when they keep them in prison they grant them all kinds of privileges, from choosing the center where they will be held to entering communication equipment and fighting cocks.
It is no coincidence that the deterioration of security conditions in Ecuador coincides with the dismantling of the State initiated by former President Lenin Moreno, continued by Lasso and which is at the heart of the neoliberal project of Noboa (son of the richest man in the country and five-time presidential candidate, Alvaro): the exponential increase in crime is a direct result of the abandonment of the social majorities and the imposition of a predatory economic model that concentrates wealth by plundering the working classes.
On the other hand, the level of coordination of the recent episodes of serious violence is suspicious, since they seem to have been planned with the purpose of installing among the citizens the idea of the inevitability of the state of exception and of conferring to the ruling oligarchy supralegal powers to reconfigure the institutions. Finally, it is deplorable that individuals and the media take advantage of the difficult situation in Ecuador to spread disinformation and false news that do nothing to contribute to the understanding of the facts and may induce a greater panic than the circumstances warrant.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English