“Today the term narcopolitics in “It has become evident,” said the Attorney General of Ecuador, Diana Salazar, in December of last year, after directing 75 simultaneous raids in seven provinces of the country and arresting 31 key people related to organized crime. It was Operation Metastasis, in which judges, prosecutors, police officers, lawyers and prison guides who had a direct line with high-profile drug lords were captured.

LOOK: “It has been the most complex year for Ecuador since it was born as a republic”

A month after the scandal that unmasked authorities who sold themselves openly to drug trafficking, the security crisis in Ecuador entered another level. The images of criminals taking over a television channel live, of police officers being subdued by inmates and of Ecuadorians running in terror to return to their homes shook the world and have shown the power that crime has and how it has penetrated the State and its institutions.

Daniel Noboa has only been in office for a month and a half and has had to make his debut in an extreme situation, but it has not been foreign or surprising. In fact, the security crisis was central to the electoral campaign, especially after the murder of candidate Fernando Villavicencio, also at the hands of organized crime.

The president decided to take the bull by the horns and issued two decrees declaring that the country is experiencing an “internal armed conflict” and that 22 criminal organizations are considered terrorists.

“President Noboa is trying to give signs that he is moving forward along a path that he offered in the campaign, regardless of whether or not they are part of a perfectly designed strategy, and that it is rather a strategy that is being built now,” Ecuadorian electoral political expert, Fausto Camacho, member of the Voices for Democracy collective, tells El Comercio.

“It is the beginning of an urgent clean-up of the Ecuadorian prison system that has been controlled by mafias for decades.”

Daniel Noboa, President of Ecuador

Although it is a structural crisis that cannot be solved overnight, the impact on citizens is being key to having the initiative. However, the government was already setting up some plans that it had to begin to specify on the fly.

Maximum security prisons

This Thursday, the Ecuadorian president presented the designs of the new maximum security megaprisons that will be built in the country, in the image and likeness of those of El Salvador, the Central American country that has now become the paradigm of law and order. .

“For the ‘Bukele lovers’, it is an identical prison,” Noboa said when making the announcement, just two days after the hostage taking and dozens of prison riots in the country. At the beginning of his mandate, Noboa had already commented on these megaprisons, where he intends to transfer the most dangerous prisoners in Ecuador and leaders of the now considered terrorist organizations, but he had to advance his plan and put it into action as soon as possible.

View from above of one of the floors of the new maximum security prison in El Salvador.  (Photo: EFE)

View from above of one of the floors of the new maximum security prison in El Salvador. (Photo: EFE)

One of them will be in the province of Pastaza, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the other in the coastal area of ​​Santa Elena. Both will have cellular and satellite signal blockers, to prevent inmates from communicating freely, as they have been doing until now; They will have armored construction, triple perimeter security and electrical self-generation, as well as faceless guards to prevent corruption of prison officials.

VIOLENCE

460 prisoners They have died in prison massacres since February 2021.

The facilities will be able to house 736 prisoners, divided between high security, maximum security and super maximum security, in order to segment them and avoid what happens now in which high-profile prisoners are mixed with thieves or scammers.

But the construction of super prisons will not be the only solution to reduce homicide rates, but rather it is treated as part of a structural and intelligent approach.

“Regaining control of prisons by the State is a supremely important step. But whether the prisons are old or new is not the underlying problem. Having new prisons is not the only area to combat organized crime and the penetration of drug trafficking into the country’s institutions,” adds Camacho.

For this reason, he points out that another very important aspect is justice and the existence or not of impunity: “Operation Metastasis has shown what was an open secret, only now the names of judges, prosecutors, police officers, even politicians have been given. , who were related to a high-ranking drug trafficker, and who continued to do so from within prison.”

Floating prisons

At the beginning of January, Noboa had already indicated the construction of these megaprisons and even advanced a tentative date for their delivery: between 10 and 11 months. While he arrived that day, his plan – already launched in his electoral campaign – was to enable barges or floating prisons, to transfer the most dangerous inmates there and keep them isolated.

“It is very attractive in an electoral campaign to offer new things with lots of technology. But, without a doubt, it is necessary to improve the prison infrastructure,” Fernando Carrión, architect, security expert and teacher in Flacso Ecuador, explains to El Comercio. “When barges were offered during the election campaign, it attracted a lot of attention, because no one likes to live next to a prison. But when Noboa comes to the government, he leaves the barges thing aside a little and rather strengthens the relationship with El Salvador, and I believe that this fact, publicized by the government, ends up generating the escape of alias Fito [Adolfo Macías, cabecilla de Los Choneros] last Sunday, and the lifting of the prisons because that implied a relocation of the prisoners,” he details.

Marine Infantry soldiers carry out an operation after a riot at the Litoral Regional Prison, in Guayaquil.  (Photo: EFE)

Marine Infantry soldiers carry out an operation after a riot at the Litoral Regional Prison, in Guayaquil. (Photo: EFE)

These floating prisons, which would be located 80 miles from the coast, would come from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, have the capacity to house up to 400 people and would cost about 8 million dollars.

The concept of a prison separated from the population in order to isolate inmates is not new. Some islands have been used for this purpose, although not very effectively, such as Alcatraz in the United States or El Frontón in Peru. As Billy Navarrete, director of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, points out to the newspaper El Universo, “little or nothing has returned security because this business is going to look for other ways to continue developing.”

The idea of ​​prison ships is not new either. The CIA has been enabling ships for 20 years to transport terrorists considered dangerous there because they consider that the danger of mutiny is reduced to a minimum, since the ships do not have engines to prevent a prisoner from taking control.

Despite complaints from human rights organizations, the United Kingdom also adapted a barge last August to transport 500 migrants seeking asylum there.

Security referendum

Another plan that is already underway is a plebiscite in which citizens will vote on everything from security reforms to employment issues. It will be a battery of almost 20 questions that Ecuadorians will have to answer in March – the precise date has not yet been established – and that include the extension of prison sentences for serious crimes such as homicide and arms trafficking, and that the Army supports the police in the fight against organized crime. In fact, one of the most controversial questions grants them legal protection “for their acts carried out with the use of force.”

The president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, during a meeting with diplomats at the Carondelet Palace, on January 10, 2024. (EFE/Presidency of Ecuador).

The president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, during a meeting with diplomats at the Carondelet Palace, on January 10, 2024. (EFE/Presidency of Ecuador).

/ Presidency of Ecuador

In this way, Noboa wants to have the support of the population so as not to be branded as undemocratic and put aside the continuous calls for the ‘bukelization’ of Ecuador.

“Bukele had a majority in Parliament and, from that, he achieved reforms to have affinity with the Prosecutor’s Office and Justice. Furthermore, almost his entire government has lived under a state of emergency. That here in Ecuador is impossible,” says Carrión, who remembers that Noboa barely has 18 representatives of the 137 in the National Assembly.

Although for now, Noboa has achieved an important political pact with Correismo, that is no guarantee of governability, especially when organized crime has no intention of giving up.



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