Ecuador arrests 6,000 people in month-long gang crackdown

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Ecuador has arrested more than 6,000 people and seized nearly 47 tonnes of illegal drugs since launching a crackdown on violent drug gangs nearly a month ago.

Ecuador, once a relatively tranquil country compared with neighbouring Colombia and Peru, is tackling a crime wave in which the murder rate increased nine-fold since 2017, according to the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, as gangs jostle for control of lucrative trafficking routes.

On January 9, President Daniel Noboa declared Ecuador was living through an “internal armed conflict”, and designated 22 gangs as terrorist groups, enabling the military to target them. He also ordered a 60-day state of emergency with nightly curfews.

Violence had surged when José Adolfo Macías, leader of the feared Los Choneros gang, escaped from jail earlier last month. In the ensuing chaos, a TV station was attacked on-air while more than 200 prison workers were taken hostage by inmates. Macías, who is better known by the alias Fito, remains at large.

Noboa, the 36-year-old son of a billionaire banana magnate, took office in November promising to confront gangs and boost the Andean nation’s faltering economy.

Since his declaration of war against the gangs, police have carried out more than 77,000 operations, including nightly raids on suspected safe houses that have yielded the seizure of nearly 2,000 guns and banknotes worth $168,000. The confiscation of 47 tonnes of illegal drugs is about a quarter of the total seizures for all of last year, according to police figures.

The government has shared photographs of inmates, shirtless and closely lined up on prison forecourts. Of the 6,341 thousand people arrested, 231 have been accused of terrorism, with the number likely to increase overcrowding at prisons that have become bases from which gangs can operate.

The number of people in jail…