“Sowing terror”: nine people were killed on Tuesday in the indiscriminate attack, by dozens of armed men, of an artisanal fishing port in the town of Esmeraldas, in northwestern Ecuador, new escalation of violence on this Pacific coast plagued by drug trafficking and bloody rivalries between gangs.
Thirty assailants, who came by boat and car, burst into the port and opened fire on the crowd of artisanal fishermen, said Interior Minister Juan Zapata, reporting nine dead.
“Seven corpses were found in the artisanal fishing port and two in a nearby health center,” said the prosecutor’s office.
According to Minister Zapata, speaking in local media, “the fishermen were under the protection of a criminal group”, and it was a rival group that carried out the attack in “retaliation”.
The incident took place around 9 a.m. local time, when more than a thousand people were in the small port in the north of the city, near the beaches of Las Playas, explained Mr. Zapata: “there were between 1,500 and 2,000 people in the port at that time, imagine the barbarism of those who did that”.
The hooded assailants, “heavily armed” and acting like “criminals”, opened fire on the crowd indiscriminately. The victims are mostly “low-income” people in the industry, he added.
On videos posted on social networks, the bloodied bodies of the victims, obviously simple fishermen and civilians, lay on the quays of the port, under the gaze of panicked onlookers and police officers with weapons in hand. Police and civilians were also busy pulling bodies out of the water.
According to the police commander in the province, General Fausto Buenano, the attackers wanted to “sow terror among the population”. At least 200 bullet holes were found on the spot and one of the vehicles used in the attack was abandoned on the spot, according to the police.
Several local media spoke of “a massacre”.
“We will capture them!” President Guillermo Lasso tweeted. “The police and the army are deployed throughout Esmeraldas in search of those responsible for this crime,” said Mr. Lasso, saying he was “in solidarity with the families of the victims”. “For them, we will not stop until they are arrested”.
On Twitter, the Ecuadorian army announced that it had “intensified its military operations (…) in order to locate those responsible for the shooting”, and had “deployed means by air, sea and land in the most conflicting sectors”.
On March 3, President Lasso declared a state of emergency for 60 days throughout the province of Esmeraldas, bordering Colombia, as well as in Guayaquil, a large port city in the south-west of the country. country, areas undermined by drug trafficking and bloody rivalries between cartels.
Located between Colombia and Peru – the world’s top cocaine producers – Ecuador seized an annual record 210 tonnes of drugs in 2021, mostly cocaine, bound for European ports.
In 2022, seizures exceeded 200 tons of drugs and the government declared war on traffickers, who fiercely defend the shipping lanes.
At the same time, the homicide rate nearly doubled. Between 2021 and 2022, it rose from 14 to 25 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the authorities.
Guayaquil, the country’s commercial hub and shipping point for most drugs, remained one of the cities most affected by the violence until now.
Ecuadorian prisons are also the scene of recurrent massacres between prisoners, always against a backdrop of rivalry between criminal groups. Since February 2021, eight massacres have been recorded in these prisons, with more than 400 prisoners killed, most of them dismembered and burned.
04/12/2023 07:08:38 – Quito (AFP) – © 2023 AFP