Ecuador | Nine dead in fishing port attack

(Quito) “To sow terror”: nine people were killed Tuesday in the indiscriminate attack, by dozens of armed men, of an artisanal fishing port in the town of Esmeraldas, in the north-west of the Ecuador, new escalation of violence on this Pacific coast plagued by drug trafficking and bloody rivalries between gangs.

Thirty assailants, who came by boat and car, burst into the port and opened fire on the crowd of artisanal fishermen, said Interior Minister Juan Zapata, reporting nine dead.

“Seven corpses were found in the artisanal fishing port and two in a nearby health center,” said the prosecutor’s office.

According to Minister Zapata, speaking on local media, “the fishermen were under the protection of a criminal group”, and it was a rival group that carried out the attack in “retaliation”.

The incident took place around 9 a.m. local time, when nearly a thousand people were in the small port in the north of the city, near the beaches of Las Playas, Zapata said.

The hooded assailants, “heavily armed” and acting like “criminals”, opened fire indiscriminately on the crowd. The victims are mostly “modest” people in the sector, he added.

On videos posted on social networks, the bloodied bodies of the victims, obviously simple fishermen and civilians, lay on the quays of the port, under the gaze of panicked onlookers and police officers with weapons in their hands. Police and civilians were also busy pulling bodies out of the water.

Several local media spoke of “a massacre”.

According to the police commander in the province, General Fausto Buenano, the attackers wanted to “sow terror among the population”. At least 200 bullet holes were found on the spot and one of the vehicles used in the attack was abandoned on the spot, according to the police.

“Locate those responsible”

On Twitter, the Ecuadorian army announced that it had “intensified its military operations […] in order to locate those responsible for the shooting”, and to have “deployed means by air, sea and land in the most conflicting sectors”.

On March 3, Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency for 60 days throughout the province of Esmeraldas, bordering Colombia, as well as in Guayaquil, a large port city in the south west of the country, areas plagued by drug trafficking and bloody rivalries between cartels.

Located between Colombia and Peru – the world’s top cocaine producers – Ecuador seized an annual record 210 tonnes of drugs in 2021, mostly cocaine, bound for European ports.

In 2022, seizures topped 200 tons of drugs and the government declared war on traffickers, who fiercely defend the shipping lanes.

At the same time, the homicide rate nearly doubled. Between 2021 and 2022, it rose from 14 to 25 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the authorities.

Guayaquil, the country’s commercial hub and shipping point for most drugs, was one of the cities most affected by the violence so far.

Ecuadorian prisons are also the scene of recurrent massacres between prisoners, against a backdrop of rivalry between criminal groups. Since February 2021, eight massacres have been recorded in these prisons, with more than 400 prisoners killed, most of them dismembered and burned.