Narco gang clashes in Ecuador kill 14 as police warn of possible “reprisals”

Clashes between rival criminal groups claimed the lives of 14 people over the weekend in Ecuador’s port city of Guayaquil, the epicenter of a bloody power struggle between narco gangs, police said Monday.

In one incident, gunmen on motorcycles fired into a crowd gathered outside a grocery store, killing a child and six adults, police chief Santiago Tuston said, warning of possible “reprisals” to follow.

Social media videos of the aftermath of the attack showed shocking images of bodies lying on the street in northern Guayaquil.

Tuston said the massacre — the exact motive of which was not divulged — brought to 14 the number of people killed in Guayaquil over the weekend. He did not provide details of the other killings.

Guayaquil is the capital of the southwestern Guayas province, where a state of emergency has been in place since January as authorities battle to curtail spiraling violence in the once-peaceful South American country.

Ecuador is home to an estimated 20 criminal gangs involved in trafficking, kidnapping and extortion, wreaking havoc in a country of 18 million that is squeezed between the world’s biggest cocaine producers, Peru and Colombia.

In recent years, the nation has been plunged into violence by the rapid spread of transnational cartels that use its ports — particularly in Guayaquil — to ship drugs to the United States and Europe.

Homicides have risen from six per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018 to a record 47 in 2023.

Under a state of emergency and military crackdown launched by President Daniel Noboa, in office since November 2023, that figure dropped to 38 per 100,000 last year, according to official data. In January 2024, Noboa declared a state of “internal armed conflict” after a brutal wave of violence, sparked by the jailbreak of a powerful crime boss.

Last Friday, hitmen gunned down a colonel who had been in charge of anti-drug operations in a different part of the port city. Police said Colonel Porfirio Cedeño, who led an air force special operations unit, was the passenger in a van taking him to a military ceremony.

Noboa is seeking a new term in elections that will go to a runoff in April after an inconclusive first round last Sunday saw him narrowly pip challenger Luisa Gonzalez.

Over the weekend, the president replaced his interior minister and replaced her with retired police general Fausto Buenano, who has years of experience fighting narco gangs.

Last month, the military said a leader of one of Ecuador’s biggest crime syndicates, Los Lobos, was arrested at his home in the coastal city of Portoviejo. The U.S. last year declared Los Lobos to be the largest drug trafficking organization in Ecuador.