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Ecuador declares emergency after 5 police gunned down

Photo: Marcos Pin / AFP

| By AFP |

Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of exception in two provinces Tuesday, after at least five police officers were killed and prison guards taken hostage in the latest wave of attacks in the deadly gang war consuming the country.

The state of exception and nightly curfew in the coastal provinces of Guayas and Esmeraldas will be in place for 45 days, and allows the government to limit freedom of assembly and movement. 

Officials said organized crime groups launched at least 13 attacks with explosives and firearms against police and oil installations in response to a transfer of inmates from Guayas 1 prison. The prison authority also reported that “shots were fired inside” the facility.

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Located in the southwestern port city of Guayaquil in Guayas province, the prison was one of the main scenes of a series of prison massacres that have left about 400 inmates dead since February 2021.

Interior Minister Juan Zapata told reporters in the Ecuadoran capital of Quito on Tuesday that there were “reactions (of) organized crime” in Guayaquil and in the northwestern oil port of Esmeraldas.

These incidents included car bomb attacks and an explosion at a bus terminal.

In the early morning hours, two police officers died when people with firearms attacked their patrol car in Guayaquil, authorities said. 

Three more officers were gunned down later in the day in the port and the nearby city of Duran.

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A separate attack on a police station there left two officers injured. 

In Esmeraldas — the same city where two headless bodies were found hanging from a pedestrian bridge on Monday — inmates took eight guards hostage, according to the SNAI prison authority.

All were later freed, the prison authority said, without giving details about the guards’ condition.

A video circulating on Twitter appeared to show two guards with explosives tied to their bodies and a man claiming to be an inmate denouncing what he called prison corruption. AFP could not independently verify the video.

“If war is what they want, war is what they’ll get,” said the man, his face obscured, adding: “We will use these guards.”

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‘Open war’

The SNAI had earlier announced on Twitter that it was moving about 200 inmates from Guayas 1 — transfers that were necessary due to required maintenance to cell blocks.

But according to the purported hostage video, the move was because of events at Esmeraldas.

“Given the events in Esmeraldas and GYE (Guayaquil), we activated our tactical and investigative units to maintain order and find the perpetrators,” the police said on Twitter. 

The education ministry suspended classes Wednesday in Esmeraldas province’s capital of the same name, while President Lasso also canceled a planned trip to the United States.

He said he will lead a central command post in Guayaquil following the wave of violence, and added that police “will intensify their operations.” 

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“These acts of sabotage and terrorism are… a declaration of open war against the rule of law the government, and against all of you, the citizens,” the president said in an address broadcast on radio and television. 

“Today, narco criminals feel uncomfortable and they express their discomfort with violence,” he added. 

Ecuador — once a relatively peaceful neighbor of major cocaine producers Colombia and Peru — has seen a wave of violent crime that authorities blame on turf battles between rival drug gangs believed to have ties to Mexican cartels.

Hundreds of inmates have been killed — many beheaded or incinerated — as the fighting spilled into Ecuador’s hugely over-populated prisons.

Civilians have increasingly been caught up in the bloodshed, which has included a spate of car bombs, while the violence has also claimed 61 police lives since last year.

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Ecuador has gone from being a drug transit route in recent years to an important distribution center in its own right, with the United States and Europe the main destinations.

The murder rate in Ecuador nearly doubled in 2021 to 14 per 100,000 inhabitants, and reached 18 per 100,000 between January and October this year.

In 2021, law enforcement seized a record 210 tons of drugs, mostly cocaine. So far this year’s seizures total 160 tons.

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International

The new truce plan in Gaza includes “many demands” from Hamas, according to an Egyptian source

The talks held between delegations from Egypt and Israel in Tel Aviv for a truce in Gaza were “largely positive and successful” and included “many of the demands” of the Islamist movement Hamas, an Egyptian security source familiar with the negotiations and another from Hamas reported to EFE on Sunday.

A delegation from Hamas, headed by the member of the political bureau Khalil al-The Hague, is expected to arrive tomorrow in Cairo, mediator in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group, to deliver its response to the mediators, according to the Egyptian source, which asked not to be identified by the sensitivity of this issue.

This new proposal, on whose content it did not provide details, “overcomes the obstacles that hinder” the declaration of a truce, a ceasefire, the exchange of prisoners and hostages, as well as the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip.

The possible announcement of a truce “will contribute to the approval of a first phase and to the efforts of the entire international community to consolidate this ceasefire and seek to move to a permanent truce instead of a temporary one,” according to the informant.

On the other hand, a source of the Palestinian Islamist movement, which also asked for anonymity, confirmed to EFE that tomorrow a delegation from Hamas will arrive in the Egyptian capital to present its response to the new Israeli proposal.

The informant added that the proposal includes “reducing the minimum number of kidnapped that Hamas will commit to freeing and eliminating divisions in sections of the Gaza Strip.”

Last Friday, an Egyptian mediating delegation traveled to Tel Aviv to discuss this truce with Israel, while the Jewish State has warned that it will not allow the Palestinian group to delay and has once again threatened to invade Rafah, at the southern end of the strip and where more than a million refugees are overcrowded.

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International

Hamas warns the United Kingdom that if it sends soldiers to Gaza they will be a “legitimate” military target

The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas warned the United Kingdom on Sunday that if it deploys military personnel in the Gaza Strip, after information that they could help in the distribution of humanitarian aid, they will be “legitimate targets” of its armed wing.

“We alert Britain, or any other country, against the deployment of forces on land or on the coast of the Gaza Strip and affirm that they will be legitimate targets for our people and their resistance,” Hamas said in a statement.

The armed group charged against any initiative in the Palestinian enclave that does not have its approval.

The Islamist group responded to the information released on Saturday by the British network BBC, according to which the British Armed Forces could deploy troops to deliver humanitarian aid on the ground arriving in Gaza through the new floating dock that is being built by Israel and the United States.

The public broadcaster indicated that the United Kingdom could be the intermediary to which the United States referred when it said that it would not be the American soldiers, but others, who would distribute the food packages sent by ship from Cyprus and then transferred to Gaza.

Yesterday, the Israeli Army assured at a press conference with international media that international organizations would be in charge of the distribution of humanitarian aid, but did not indicate which ones would have agreed to collaborate.

Although the British Government has not confirmed the news, the BBC affirms, according to anonymous sources, that the Ministry of Defense is considering getting involved with ‘wet boots’ on the ground.

The possible role of the British forces would involve driving the trucks with the help from the landing boats on the floating runway, hundreds of meters long, and delivering it to a safe distribution area on dry land, the station explained.

The London Ministry of Defense reported on Friday, in turn, that the British Navy auxiliary ship RFA Cardigan Bay set sail from Cyprus to provide support for the construction of the temporary dock, which is led by the United States.

This ship will provide accommodation for hundreds of American sailors and soldiers, about whom Washington has made it clear that they will not set foot in Gaza territory.

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International

Nancy Pelosi says that Netanyahu “could not have made things worse” in Gaza

Former President of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said that the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, “could not have made things worse” in the conflict in Gaza, in an interview broadcast this Sunday by the BBC.

Pelosi, who on Thursday participated in an event at the English university of Oxford, told the ‘Laura Kuenssberg Program’ that Netanyahu “was never a peace agent” and admitted that she “is not a great fan of his.”

The congresswoman said that what is happening in the Strip “challenges the conscience of the world” and maintained that the impact of famine on children “is almost unforgivable”, while calling the Hamas attack on Israeli territory on October 7 “barbaric”.

“Israel has the right to defend itself, but the way it is doing it is a challenge because Netanyahu has never been a peace agent,” he said.

“I’m not a great admirer of yours; I couldn’t have done things worse than those tens of thousands, or whatever number it is, of dead people, malnourished children and the uncertainty that exists… and that’s what people are talking about,” he said.

Asked if she understood why young people in the United States used controversial tactics when protesting against the conflict, Pelosi opined that “when they go beyond the campuses and block the Golden Gate Bridge, or something else, for a long time, and people can’t go to the doctor or the hospital or anything urgent in their lives, they don’t get support.”

But he added: “How can demonstrations on (university) campuses be criticized? That’s a way of life in the United States.”

On Thursday, the British police evicted two pro-Palestinian protesters who protested during their speech on populism to students from the University of Oxford, while abroad another group criticized her for her defense of Israel and her position on the movement to support Palestine.

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