Ecuador police hold two for prosecutor’s murder, soldiers raid prison
GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador:
Ecuador’s authorities on Thursday arrested the suspected killers of a prosecutor and deployed soldiers to take control of a key prison as part of an ongoing “war” between the government and powerful criminal gangs.
The prosecutor was gunned down Wednesday in his car on the streets of the port city of Guayaquil, which has become a dangerous hub for the export of cocaine from neighboring countries.
Police Commander General Cesar Zapata said on social media Thursday that two suspects had been arrested.
He said a rifle, two pistols and two cars have been seized as “evidence.”
The slain prosecutor, Cesar Suarez, had been in charge of the investigation into last week’s dramatic, live-broadcast assault by gangsters on a state-owned TV studio, also in Guayaquil.
Meanwhile, hundreds of soldiers and police, accompanied by army trucks, poured Thursday into a vast penitentiary complex – the same one from which gang boss Adolfo Macias, alias ‘Fito’, escaped last week.
The jailbreak sparked a government crackdown and, in turn, fierce retaliation from criminal groups.
After Thursday’s raid, the army shared photos of cuffed inmates in their underwear lying face down in prison courtyards.
Similar images have been disseminated in recent days as the government tries to wrest control of prisons back from the gangs.
Uniformed officers are “in control of the external and internal perimeter of the penitentiary complex” at Guayaquil, the army wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
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 Fito’s escape, 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.
The explosion in violence comes weeks after AttorneyGeneral Diana Salazar announced an investigation highlighting links between the gangs and powerful state officials, from judges to a former prisons chief.
Salazar launched the ‘Metastasis’ investigation after the prison death in 2022 of powerful drug lord Leandro Norero.
Her team scoured through chats and call logs from his cellphone, finding links to highranking officials who handed out favors in exchange for money, gold, prostitutes, apartments and other luxuries.
More than 900 people took part in the investigation, which resulted in more than 75 raids and dozens of arrests.
“The response to this operation will surely be an escalation of violence,” she predicted in December.
Salazar said she had received death threats from the powerful Los Lobos (The Wolves) gang – whose boss Fabricio Colon also escaped from prison last week.
Those investigating the gangs have become targets.