Ecuador increases militarization of Guayaquil. What does the Lasso government say?

The president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, announced last Sunday a battery of measures to try to stop the wave of crime that the city of Guayaquil, in the province of Guayas, in the coastal region of the country, is experiencing.

Until Friday of last week, in the first 21 days of 2022, 197 homicides were registered throughout Ecuador, 159% more than in the same period of 2021, when there were 76, explains RT.

Of those 197 murders, 62 were recorded in Zone 8, which includes the Durán, Samborondón and Guayaquil cantons —the latter with 50 of these homicides—, according to a publication in the newspaper El Universo.

Last week, two foreigners were murdered in Guayaquil. On Wednesday, it was a Dutch tourist, who was shot during an assault on a bar-restaurant, located on the touristic Santa Ana hill, in the center of Guayaquil. Three days later, on Saturday the 22nd, an Albanian man received three bullet wounds that caused his death in a restaurant on Joaquín José Orrantia Avenue, near a shopping center in the north of the city.

The deployment

Given the increase in crime, Lasso held a meeting on Sunday afternoon at the headquarters of the Guayas Governor’s Office with the mayor of Guayaquil, Cynthia Viteri; the Minister of Government, Alexandra Vela, and other authorities.

“As president of the Republic, I am here together with the mayor of Guayaquil to respond to a problem that outrages all Ecuadorians: citizen insecurity. This is a challenge that we all want to face together, all united», said the president in statements given after the meeting.

Thus, Lasso announced the dispatch of 1,100 additional police officers and the reinforcement of military operations in the streets of Guayaquil. He also arranged for the Deputy Minister of the Interior, Max Campos, to move to the city and establish an operations center to coordinate the work of the Police.

In addition, the president announced that General Carlos Fernando Cabrera replaces Tannya Varela in the General Command of the National Police.

Lasso also said that an additional 9 million dollars will be made available for security in Guayaquil and a bill will be presented to regulate the use of force and several reforms to legal bodies to strengthen security.

To what do they attribute crime in Ecuador?

Lasso associated the increase in crime with the government’s fight against mafias related to drug trafficking, which – in his opinion – have led to settling scores and violent deaths.

He reported that in 2021, 210 tons of drugs were seized, «a historical record for Ecuador»; and so far in 2022, 15 tons of cocaine have been seized, which is equivalent to triple what was seized in the same period last year. He also said that «the territory of the mafias, where they acted without the presence of the State, has been reduced».

«The settling of accounts is the effect of these seizures that generate enormous economic losses for international mafias and provoke competition between the different drug gangs», he commented.

Social indicators in Ecuador
In his statement to the press, the president did not speak of common crime or the social indicators to which it is usually associated.

He also did not refer to the deepening of poverty in the South American country in recent years.

According to the latest report from the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC), published in June 2021, income poverty at the national level stood at 32.2% at that time, compared to 25% in December 2019; while extreme poverty reached 14.7%, a considerable increase from the 8.9% published a year and a half earlier.

For its part, the Gini index, which calculates inequality, stood at 0.493 at the national level in June 2021.