More terror in Ecuador. After last week's escalation of violence, with the new president Daniel Noboa declaring a state of emergency and promising an uncompromising fight against the drug trafficking gangs who first threw the prisons and then the streets into turmoil, yesterday a new shocking episode: the attorney of Guayaquil, Cesar Suarez, who was investigating the episode that had triggered the violence, namely theraid by a group of criminals during the live broadcast of a program on public television, it was murdered by gunshots while he was traveling to court in a car. The vehicle, according to the newspaper El Universo, was pierced by at least 20 gun bullets, fired by unidentified men.
State of "internal armed conflict" proclaimed after Suarez's murder
In all likelihood they belong to one of the 22 organizations identified by the Ecuadorian government and classified as “terrorist”: from the Choneros, the largest militia group today, to the Latin Kings, a gang of Puerto Ricans founded in the 50s in Chicago and also present in Europe. The explosion of violence, which in truth had been giving alarming signals in prisons across the country for some time, led President Noboa, a centre-right outsider elected a few months ago and scion of a famous and influential magnate of the South American country, to declare a state of “internal armed conflict”. In recent days the situation seemed to have returned to relative normality, before yesterday's terrible murder. Shortly after the news of Suarez's assassination, the attorney general intervened publicly Diana Salazar, reassuring about the continuation of the Justice effort in the fight against crime: "Terrorists will not stop our commitment to Ecuadorian society". The magistrate asked that the hearings on this case be held remotely from now on, to minimize or even better completely avoid the investigators' travel around the city.
Suarez was a university professor and had already received death threats in 2017: the bandits had offered 1 million dollars for his head. He was investigating, together with other colleagues, the episode of the break-in on public television by dozens of hooded men, only a dozen of whom ended up in handcuffs. What triggered the conflict was the escape from the Guayaquil prison of the well-known boss called Phyto, leader of the Choneros gang, the most active currently in Ecuador. Panic broke out in the prisons immediately afterwards and 170 prison officials were seized last week, then released last Sunday.
