QUITO (AP) — Three videos in which alleged members of criminal gangs operating in Ecuador offer a period of peace in the country have been released in recent days and led the highest government and security authorities on Thursday to deny any type of agreement, after a succession of violent episodes and clashes in prisons.
In less than a week, clashes in Ecuadorian prisons left 31 dead and a temporary detention of 100 prison officers, as well as the murder of a mayor and several attacks with explosives. This chain of attacks rebounded on strong criticism of the government of President Guillermo Lasso, who mobilized the military, issued two states of emergency and made efforts to regain control of the prisons.
In parallel, three videos allegedly recorded inside prisons where three of the organized crime gangs, identified by the authorities as responsible for the high and still increasing rates of insecurity and murders, claimed to have reached an agreement, were broadcast on social networks. among all criminal groups so that there is peace in Ecuador. With an allusion to the pact being “jointly with the police.”
Although no authority or official has confirmed, denied or specified in recent days whether the recordings are real and taken in prison spaces or whether the alleged leaders are actually recognized as leaders of criminal organizations operating in Ecuadorian territory, President Lasso, the director of the prison system and the Minister of the Interior came out on Thursday to deny that there is any kind of agreement with criminal groups.
“This government does not negotiate and is not going to negotiate with criminals,” Lasso stressed Thursday. “We are going to continue facing them without truce,” insisted the president. “We have not agreed with criminals as they pretend to appear and I want to forcefully say that we will never agree with organized crime,” he concluded.
In the first of the videos, published Tuesday night, a man identifies himself as Adolfo Macías, a name that corresponds to Alias Fito, leader of the Los Choneros gang. He appears with his face uncovered and behind him is another man wearing a police uniform jacket.
He offers to put an end to the vaccinations, extortions and violent deaths that have plunged Ecuadorians into a wave of fear and as a gesture of commitment, several of his companions hand over three pistols and a machine gun on a table.
The Minister of the Interior, Juan Zapata, spoke about the presence of the alleged policeman on Thursday, two days later, in an interview on the Teleamazonas television channel. He confirmed that the person appearing in a police jacket is indeed an agent and that an investigation has been opened.
“It will be explained to them at the right time. There is a clear explanation and due to security issues of the same (police), we have to get it out of Guayaquil,” he said without giving further details about it.
In the same television space, Zapata closed ranks on any pact with the gangs and assured that no one in the government is authorized to sit down and talk with these groups. That, he pointed out, “breaks the schemes we have, our line from the president, the government, (which) is to continue operating against crime.”
One day before the pronouncements of the president and the Minister of the Interior, another video allegedly recorded by members of Los Tiguerones was also broadcast on social networks with a similar offer of peace agreed between the criminal groups.
Finally, on Thursday a third recording was released with more than twenty people who appear first in white clothes and without weapons and then take off their shirts to show other black ones and heavy caliber weapons. Whoever speaks in the video, covered with a cap that prevents his face from being seen, claims to represent Los Lobos and also join the peace pact.
According to a police report, collected among the events that motivated the government to once again declare a state of emergency, the breakdown of an alliance between Los Lobos and Los Tiguerones is the origin of the new outbreak of violence in the country, which has been mired in a rise in murders and crime for more than two years.
The director of the Service for Attention to Prisoners of Liberty (SNAI), Guillermo Rodríguez, also referred to the peace proposal and stated that what was announced by these gangs is “a voluntary surrender” (of weapons). But he insisted that “in this case no official … has been authorized to make any approach.”
Rodríguez attributed these statements by the criminal gangs to the firm reaction of the State and added that the pacts are “among them and that we have nothing to do with that issue.”
The Lasso government, which began its term in May 2021, has attributed the violence that has plagued the country for more than two years to the dispute between criminal gangs for power and control of local and international drug trafficking routes. and micro-trafficking.
In that year, he created a pacification commission for the prisons with national and foreign delegates with which he sought to put an end to the confrontations and a truce prior to the delivery of arms by the gangs, but this never came.
On the contrary, the failed attempt was followed by new confrontations inside the prisons, which add up to more than 400 prisoners murdered since 2021.
In August 2022, the inmates of a prison in Cuenca, one of the three largest in the country, signed a peace agreement with the delivery of weapons promoted by the SNAI, which sought a harmonious coexistence of the inmates, after At the beginning of that same year, a fight between prisoners left 20 dead.
A similar document was signed a month earlier in the Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas prison. Neither of the two initiatives definitively stopped deaths within the penitentiary system.
