Ecuador Follows El Salvador in Arresting Gangs and Retaking Prisons

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s uncompromising approach to rooting out criminal gangs is beginning to be adopted elsewhere in Latin America, with striking results.

Homicides in Ecuador tumbled 70% in a month after President Daniel Noboa sent in the military to arrest suspected gang members and retake control of the prisons where their leaders orchestrated cocaine shipments and planned a wave of killings that had plunged the country into chaos. Other countries have said they are looking at doing much the same.

Ecuador’s new approach, enacted after gangsters stunned the nation by storming a public television station on Jan. 9, uses many of the methods introduced by El Salvador’s Bukele to lower homicides by 92% since 2015, when that country was the world’s murder capital.

“We’re delivering results, things are improving, the violence is declining,” Noboa said in a recent television interview. “But we don’t know when this war is going to end, no one knows.”

Bukele has in four years transformed his tiny Central American nation from one of the most violent in Latin America to one of the safest. A booming cocaine trade helped make Ecuador one of the world’s deadliest nations, with homicides shooting up from fewer than 1,000 in 2018 to 8,009 in 2023.

In some of the more violent Latin American countries, politicians say they are looking to copy Bukele’s policies despite concerns by civil liberty groups about rights abuses and his increasing, unchecked power. Honduras issued a state of emergency that curbed freedom of assembly and other constitutional rights to fight organized crime and extortion. Peru deployed troops to parts of the capital, Lima, and Congress now wants to reopen a notorious island prison once used to house Maoist insurgents.

In Ecuador, authorities say they will emulate El Salvador by building their own high-security detention centers to isolate gang leaders. Noboa says his government will contract the same company that built Bukele’s biggest prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center, which can hold 40,000.

“If you want to go and spend a night, you can. Just commit a crime first,” Noboa, a 36-year-old scion of a banana magnate who took office in November, said in a recent interview with Ecuadorean media.

Noboa’s strategy is the latest iteration of the “iron fist” security measures of the 1970s and ’80s that Latin American governments, many of them military dictatorships, used to crush leftist rebels while committing widespread rights violations. Now, democracies whipsawed by crime are dusting off that model for use against gangs. Ecuador’s military says it respects human rights during its operations.

“The iron fist strategy presents an enduring appeal for Latin American presidents besieged by internal security threats,” said John Polga-Hecimovich, a Latin American expert at the U.S. Naval Academy. “It is something tangible that they can offer to citizens to show they are going after these groups with everything that they have.”

The measures are popular in a region with the world’s highest homicide rates. Noboa’s approval rating rose to 80% last month, according to local pollster Comunicaliza, while Bukele won re-election on Feb. 4 in a landslide.

“We’re on the right path; I hope they don’t let up,” said Never Martinez, a 43-year-old truck driver in Guayaquil, the port city at the epicenter of the violence. “The mafia advanced so much that they terrorized the entire country. We’re still anxious, but not as much as before.”

A militarized response to drug trafficking often results in a resumption in violence longer term, said Polga-Hecimovich, because it doesn’t address the social conditions driving young people to join gangs. “I’m very skeptical that this is going to solve the problem,” he said of Ecuador’s strategy.

The U.S. is helping Noboa, say President Biden’s special adviser on the Americas, Christopher Dodd, and Gen. Laura Richardson, head of U.S. forces in Latin America. In a trip to Ecuador last month, the two officials said the U.S. would share intelligence, train Ecuadorean police and prosecutors, and help investigators target drug traffickers and corrupt officials. Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel in Ecuador working with authorities on investigations are being beefed up. The U.S. is also providing 20,000 bulletproof vests, ambulances and other equipment.

The security crisis, marked by bodies left hanging from bridges, car bombs, and politicians and prosecutors assassinated, initially helped Noboa rally support from his country’s fractious political parties.

“We’re living a tense calm,” said Billy Navarrete, head of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Guayaquil. “You can temporarily control the situation with militarization, but in the long term it will boil over again.”

Navarrete says his organization has documented numerous cases of security officials beating up young men in poor barrios who use drugs but aren’t gang members. “It’s quite abusive,” Navarrete said of security forces. “It is to show these communities what they are capable of.”

In one case this month, the family of 19-year-old Carlos Vega said soldiers opened fire after his car inadvertently bumped into a military vehicle. The military countered that it had fired on “terrorists” avoiding a checkpoint.

“They treated my son like a terrorist, but he wasn’t,” said Vega’s father, also named Carlos Vega. He said his son worked in the family bakery and had just been accepted to a university.

Analysts say Ecuador’s security problems are more challenging than El Salvador’s, where street gangs are mainly involved in extortion. Noboa’s government is going up against local gangs allied with powerful Mexican, Colombian and Albanian cocaine-trafficking syndicates, which have used their billions in ill-gotten gains to import high-powered weapons and pay off police, prison officials and judges.

Still, just 58 people were killed the week of Jan. 29 to Feb. 4, in Ecuador, compared with 201 slayings the first week of January before Noboa’s state of emergency, police data show.

The decline has been even steeper in the most violent barrios. In Durán, a Guayaquil suburb where the mayor has spent the last year in hiding after surviving an assassination attempt, three people were killed during the week of Jan. 29, compared with 44 slayings during the first week of the year, a 93% decline, police said.

When Andrea Tello, a teacher, watched a dozen masked and armed assailants broadcast demands in January after taking over the public-TV station, she feared more carnage. She said she even thought to herself that it was time to migrate to the U.S., as have tens of thousands of Ecuadoreans.

But Tello said she rarely hears gunshots since Noboa declared an internal armed conflict in January and deployed the military to fight 22 criminal groups that his government labeled as terrorist organizations.

“We have to continue with this until all of these groups fall, all of them are eradicated,” she said. “We lost our civil rights a long time ago—but because of these criminal groups, not the armed forces.”

Today, soldiers patrol Guayaquil in armored vehicles, entering poor barrios that had been no-go zones. Some 6,600 people have been detained in the past month, according to officials. Soldiers also seized a 22-ton, $1.1 billion load of cocaine on a farm, one of the world’s largest single seizures ever, underscoring the amount of drugs transiting through the country from Colombia before heading to the U.S. and Europe.

The government also said it regained control of the source of the security problem, the prisons, a move that law-enforcement officials say has been vital to reducing violence by preventing imprisoned criminal leaders from communicating with their street enforcers.

Authorities have published pictures online similar to those shown in El Salvador of shirtless inmates crouched together on the floor while surrounded by masked soldiers. Soldiers say they have found automatic rifles, grenades and knives in prisons, along with 65-inch TVs, liquor and Jacuzzis. Today, inmates do morning exercises and sweep the floor while supervised by soldiers, images posted on X by the armed forces show.

“By controlling the prisons,” said Mario Pazmiño, the army’s former director of intelligence, “you take away the capacity of the criminal groups to react and operate.”

But Pazmiño says it is unwise to believe that the drug gangs won’t fight back.

“There are going to be retaliations,” he said. “The state and the population need to prepare for that.”

Write to Ryan Dubé at [email protected]