Soldiers enter key Ecuador prison as 'war' on narcos deepens

The Ecuadorean Army and Police have launched an operation in a vast penitentiary complex in the port city of Guayaquil, the epicentre of a drug war between the government and powerful criminal groups.

Video released by the military on Thursday 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 neighbouring countries.

"Army and Police personnel are carrying out a new intervention" to "control the external and internal perimeters of the penitentiary centre," the Armed Forces said in a press release.

The operation comes a day after prosecutor César Suárez was gunned down in his car in Guayaquil on Wednesday, the latest in a series of high-profile assassinations in Ecuador.

Local media broadcast images of Suárez's truck with bullet holes through the driver's window on a street in the port city of Guayaquil, the nerve centre of Ecuador's war against narco gangs.

Police Commander General César Zapata said on social media Thursday that two suspects had been arrested.

Zapata said "evidence" against them included a rifle, two pistols, a firearm charger and two cars.

Suárez had been tasked with leading the investigation into last week's dramatic, live-broadcast assault by cartel members on a state-owned TV studio, also in Guayaquil.

'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.

In response to the escape of Macias, President Daniel Noboa imposed a state of emergency and nightly curfew.

Drug cartels reacted swiftly, threatening to execute civilians and security forces and taking hostage dozens of police and prison officials, since released.

On January 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 live-televised attack caused widespread panic across Ecuador, with people leaving work early to seek shelter at home.

Noboa then declared the country in a "state of war."

Prosecutors targeted

Attorney General Diana Salazar said the murdered prosecutor, Suárez, had received death threats from the powerful Los Lobos ("The Wolves") gang – whose boss Fabricio Colón also escaped from prison last week.

Suárez 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.

-TIMES/AFP