Two armed attacks against civilians left at least 14 dead on Sunday in a coastal region of the Ecuador, where the gangs of drug traffickers are fighting for power, police announced.
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“We have approximately 12 dead and three injured,” Commander Oscar Valencia, police chief of the city of El Empalme, told the press in the southwest.
The same attackers shot another group not far from the site of the first massacre, killing two other people, he said.
The country has become one of the most violent in the region, with a homicide rate of 38 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2024.
By taking an oath in May for a second term, the Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa promised to “save” his “mafias” his country in the grip with the narcotic gangs.
The Sunday killing took place in front of an alcohol sales store in Guayas, near El Empalme.
Commander Valencia said on Sunday that people traveling aboard two vans attacked with “pistols and rifles” of civilians gathered in the street.
“They opened fire on everyone,” he added.
Police gathered at least 40 ballistic pieces on the scene, said the police chief, adding that a 12 -year -old boy was a “collateral victim”.
A week ago, nine people were killed while they were playing billiards in a bar at the General Villamil tourist resort (southwest).
About twenty homicides had already been recorded in the Manta fishing port (also in the southwest), where the Ecuadorian drug baron Adolfo Macias, alias Fito, was taken up in June and extradited to the United States to be tried in July.
In the first five months of 2025, the equator recorded 4051 homicides, according to official figures.
Experts consider that this is the most violent year in the country’s recent history,
Due to its geographical location between Colombia and Peru – the world’s largest producing countries in cocaine – and its strategic ports on the Pacific, the equator has become in recent years the theater of violent clashes linked to drug trafficking.
Local drug drugs are linked to Mexican and Colombian cartels, as well as the Albanian mafia.
According to official sources, 73 % of the cocaine produced in the world passes through the Ecuadorian territory.
In 2024, the country entered a record of 294 tonnes of drugs, mainly cocaine, against 221 tonnes in 2023.
