Scores of hostages have been released from Ecuador’s gang-controlled prisons, the government has claimed, nearly a week after the South American country was shaken by a massive wave of violence.
“All of the hostages have been freed,” the Ecuadorian presidency announced on social media on Saturday night.
It was unclear exactly how many captives had been rescued from the country’s notoriously overcrowded jails but last week the government said 158 prison guards were being held as well as 20 other employees. Social media videos showed terrified prison guards being held and threatened by machete-wielding gang members who had commandeered many of Ecuador’s detention centres.
The brother of one prison guard who was abducted in Ambato, a city 95 miles south of Ecuador’s capital, Quito, confirmed his relative had been released on Saturday afternoon. “Thank God everyone emerged safe and well and my brother is now at home with us,” he said on Sunday morning, amid reports that security forces were storming several large penitentiaries where prisoners had also risen up.
Ecuador’s week of mayhem began in the early hours of last Monday when a notorious gang leader known as Fito reportedly vanished from his cell. His whereabouts remains a mystery. A nationwide eruption of violence and turmoil unfolded in the subsequent days, as gangsters torched buildings, attacked security forces and planted car bombs in what was one of the most extreme outbursts of violence in Ecuador’s recent history.
In response, Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, declared his country in a state of “internal armed conflict” and ordered a massive police and army crackdown on the gangs. So far, 1,105 people have been arrested and five alleged “terrorists” killed while two police officers have also lost their lives, according to government figures.
In Guayaquil, one of the worst affected cities, the Guardian witnessed heavily armed air force and police special forces teams using battering rams and bolt cutters to smash their way into a number of houses on Thursday night. In one two-storey residence they captured two alleged members of Los Águilas (the Eagles), one of 22 criminal groups that Noboa’s government has classified as terrorist groups.
Ecuador has long been considered one of Latin America’s safest countries but its murder rate has quadrupled since 2018, in large part because of a vicious squabble for control of cocaine trafficking routes used to smuggle drugs to Europe and the US.
In an interview with the BBC on Friday, Noboa said he was determined to stop his country becoming a “narco-state” and believed a hardline crackdown was the only way to achieve that goal.
“We aren’t going out to hunt people down and kill them … but we are at war and we are fighting against people who are heavily armed, organised, with domestic and international financial backing and a structure of terror and criminality that reaches far beyond Ecuador’s borders,” Noboa told the television network Telemundo.
