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A recent series of massacres in Ecuador is further evidence that greater access to powerful weapons, increased impunity and an atomized criminal landscape are leading to more mass killings.
Ten people were shot and dismembered in a mass shooting on December 1 in El Oro province, including nine Colombians and an Ecuadorian national. A few days earlier, on November 28, gunmen killed three people and injured at least three more Duran on a local football field.
Massacres – incidents in which three or more people are killed in the same place and at the same time – have steadily increased in Ecuador since 2020, affecting parts of the country previously untouched by extreme acts of violence. Such homicides in 2024 are approaching 2023 levels, despite the Ecuadorian government declaring a “state of internal conflict” and an unprecedented military crackdown on organized crime.
The percentage of murder victims in Ecuador dying in massacres has increased significantly since 2020, from 2% to 15% between 2020 and 2021. The driving force behind this first phase was a wave of mass killings committed by warring gangs competing for valuable territory within the prison system . as they tried to eliminate rivals. In September 2021, a clash between gangs in Latacunga prison resulted in 119 deaths. Authorities counted 68 and 34 victims in other prison massacres that year. In total, the Ministry of Defense recorded eighteen prison massacres between 2021 and 2023.
But so far, in 2024, criminal groups have only committed one massacre in the prison system, while the percentage of total murder victims dying in mass killings in Ecuador has remained high. There are various explanations for this.
For starters, Ecuador’s criminal groups now have greater access to powerful, automatic weapons. Spurred on by looser gun ownership regulations and a boom in illegal arms trafficking, this has exacerbated the evolution of massacres outside prison walls, giving warring criminal groups the means to eliminate large groups of rivals in one go.
“The killing power of a weapon is so great that there is undoubtedly a close relationship between the availability of weapons and the number of deaths,” said Carla Álvarez, professor at the Ecuadorian Institute for Higher National Studies (Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales). InSight Crime.
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The problem is exacerbated by continued impunity for violent crimes within Ecuador’s judicial institutions, a dynamic that signals to criminal groups that massacres will go unpunished. Impunity for homicide exceeded 90% in many coastal provinces by 2023, El Universo reportedbecause authorities do not have the investigative capacity to keep up with persistently high murder rates. Even if you get caught, judicial corruption networks as visible through the landmark Metastasis case provide ways to avoid penalties and other legal consequences.
The increase in massacres also comes as more and more fragmenting gangs fight for their place in the country’s lucrative criminal landscape. Security officials, criminal sources and security experts told InSight Crime during recent fieldwork in Ecuador that gangs on the streets were cut off from their leaders in prisons after the military crackdown began in January, leaving them without orders. Many leaders also fled the country in response to the measures.
Ecuador’s criminal groups have since recovered, albeit quickly atomized way. For example, in response to changing leadership, many local factions of the Lobos, Choneros, and Tiguerones have split or changed their allegiances, diversifying revenue sources and fueling growing criminal economies such as extortion, kidnappingand illegal gold mining.
As a result, conflict and competition between them have increased, and they have often turned to the use of massacres to eliminate their enemies and influence the type of mass defections that have occurred within the penitentiary system. In June 2024, authorities recorded the second most massacres of any month in Ecuador’s history.
“There is animosity with all the party changes that have happened,” a local leader of the Ñetas street gang in Guayaquil, who chose to remain anonymous for security reasons, told InSight Crime in May. “Many Choneros have become Lobos, and many Lobos have become Tiguerones. They are intermingled.”
The impact of these shifts is most evident in gold-producing areas. To make incursions into the industry, groups have done so consolidated their control over artisanal miners, first extorting their activities and then taking over the mines for themselves, contesting territory with other criminal groups.
The Sierran province of Azuay, a mining hotspot, reported no massacres in 2023, but seven in 2024. In the Amazon provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana, also mining hubs, authorities recorded nine mass killings so far in 2024, after just 13 in total since 2010 .until 2023.
SEE ALSO:As government pressure mounts, Ecuadorian gangs strike gold
Part of the motive for massacres appears to be a tool for control over the civilian population, Luis Fernando Trejos, a professor at the Universidad del Norte who has studied massacres in the Colombian context, told InSight Crime.
“There are zones in which the armed group already controls the area, and massacres appear as mechanisms of collective punishment for the violation of the norms established by the group,” he said.
For example, local media have reported on the dominance of the Colombian Border Command (Comandos de la Frontera) over the criminal underworld in Sucumbíos, located on Ecuador’s northeastern border with Colombia. There, the group regulates criminal activity and combats violence, with the police chief of Sucumbíos telling Primicias on November 9 that murders are possible in the province. attributed to a “social cleansing campaign” by the Border Command.
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