Since Ecuador’s president declared war on criminal gangs last month, soldiers armed with assault rifles have flooded the streets of Guayaquil, a sprawling city on the Pacific coast that has been the epicenter of the nation’s descent into violence , lasting years.
They take men from buses and cars looking for drugs, weapons and gang tattoos, and patrol the streets enforcing night curfews. The city is tense, its men and boys potential targets for troops and police officers ordered to take down powerful gangs that have joined forces with international cartels to make Ecuador a hub of global drug trafficking.
Yet, when people see soldiers passing by, many applaud or raise their thumbs. “We applaud the iron fist, we celebrate it,” said the mayor of Guayaquil, Aquiles Álvarez. “He helped bring peace.”
In early January, Guayaquil was hit by a wave of violence that could prove a turning point in the country’s long security crisis: gangs attacked the city after authorities moved to take over prisons of Ecuador, largely controlled by gangs.
Police officers were kidnapped, explosives were detonated and detonated an episode broadcast live, a dozen armed men were briefly seized at a major television station.
President Daniel Noboa declared internal conflict, an extraordinary step taken when the state was attacked by an armed group. He has deployed troops against gangs that have overrun much of Ecuador, fighting to control cocaine trafficking routes and transforming it from one of South America’s most peaceful countries to its deadliest.
Ecuador’s top military commander warned that every member of the gang was now “a military objective”.
Noboa’s aggressive response has reduced violence and brought an uneasy sense of security to places like Guayaquil, a city of 2.7 million people and a major drug trafficking port, prompting government approval to 76 percent in a recent national survey.
It also raised alarm among human rights activists.
“We don’t see anything new or innovative,” said Fernando Bastias of Guayaquil’s Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights. “What we are seeing is an increase in cases of serious human rights violations.”
Ecuador’s approach has drawn comparisons to that of El Salvador, whose young leader, Nayib Bukele, has largely dismantled his vicious gangs, earning himself a landslide victory for re-election and adulation across Latin America . But critics say he has also trampled on human rights and the rule of law by ordering mass arrests that have trapped innocent people.
“Ecuador is an important case because it’s almost like a second laboratory for Bukele’s policies,” said Gustavo Flores-Macías, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell University who specializes in Latin America. “People are so desperate that they believe in the need for these iron-fisted policies to bring down crime.”
Policies can be effective but, he added, “the cost in terms of civil liberties is high.”
As Mr. Bukele wants, Mr. Noboa, 36 years old to build mega-prisons and his social media posts contain loud music and images of prisoners handcuffed and naked to the waist. She proclaims it”The Noboa method.”
However, there are important differences, said Christopher Sabatini, senior researcher for Latin America at Chatham House, a research group in London. While Bukele disdains democracy, Noboa “has painted his government as a democracy under siege,” Sabatini said.
Noboa also faces a different adversary, said Will Freeman, a Latin American studies fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“El Salvador has never been important for drug trafficking,” he said. “It’s just too small.” Ecuador, by contrast, is now at the center of global cocaine trafficking, with links to cartels from Mexico to Europe. As a result, his gangs have millions with which to arm themselves to fight the authorities.
But, he added, “we see Noboa moving toward a strategy of mass arrests.”
Since the president declared war on the criminal gangs, the Ecuadorian authorities have arrested them more than 6,000 people.
In Guayaquil, soldiers and police officers destroy camera systems installed by gangs to monitor entire neighborhoods, raid areas once largely off-limits to the police and break down doors TO discover caches of weapons and explosives.
The repression had some effect.
From December to January, the number of homicides in Guayaquil fell by 33 percent, from 187 to 125. Outside the city morgue, Cheyla Jurado, a street vendor who sells juice and pastries to families waiting to retrieve bodies, said said the crowd had visibly thinned out.
“Now, it’s car crashes, drownings,” he said.
At the city’s largest hospital, the number of patients arriving with gunshot wounds and other violence-related injuries has dropped from five a day to as low as one every three days, said Dr. Rodolfo Zevallos, an emergency room doctor rescue.
The reprieve from the bloodshed – while still in its early stages – has many roots for the young president.
“We can sit outside in the evening,” said Janet Cisneros, who sells homemade meals in Guayaquil’s Suburbio neighborhood. “Before we couldn’t – we were just completely stuck inside.”
Noboa, heir to a banana fortune, was elected in November to finish his predecessor’s term, which was ended when he dissolved parliament, triggering snap elections.
In January, when the violence erupted, he traded his suits and shy smile for a grimace, a short haircut and black leather jacketannouncing that Ecuador will no longer take orders from “narco-terrorist groups.”
The hard-line message is aimed at Ecuadorians, who will vote for president again next year, political scientist Flores-Macías said, but it is also intended to win support from international leaders, particularly President Biden. Mr. Noboa, he said, “sees clearly that he needs the support – the guidance, the funding and the help – of the United States.”
Until now, the Biden administration provided to Ecuador with equipment and training along with approximately $93 million in military and humanitarian aid.
Ecuador officials have said the army is critical to the reconquest neighborhoods by gangs who have become the de facto authorities, recruiting boys as young as 12 to transport drugs, kidnap and kill.
Mr. Noboa’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
In Guayaquil, police paint over murals depicting gang leaders. Soldiers conducting street raids read to youths found with small bags of marijuana about the dangers of drugs or a life of crime.
But videos have circulated online showing the authorities also using more brutal tactics: men and boys are rounded up on the streets hit in the head or forced to do so kiss each other. In a widely shared video, a teenager is forced to do so tattoo scrubs until his chest is bloody.
In prisons where servicemen have been sent to gang-controlled 16-year-olds, similar abuses are occurring, according to lawyers and inmates’ families.
“They beat the prisoners worse than Jesus Christ,” said Fernanda Lindao, whose son is serving a sentence for robbery at Guayaquil’s Litoral penitentiary. “There are no human rights for prisoners.”
However, videos of the arrests are extremely popular, with many Ecuadorians praising the soldiers and the president.
“The public applauds what is happening,” said Álvarez, mayor of Guayaquil, “and they do not applaud it because they are bad people, but because they are tired of all the violence they have suffered.”
To explain their support for Noboa’s tactics, many describe how bad things had gotten.
“They killed here, they dumped the bodies,” said Rosa Elena Guachicho, who lives in Durán, a Guayaquil suburb with unpaved roads and no drinking water. “A month ago they found one in a pillowcase, cut into pieces.”
Dolores Garacoia he said gangs had taken control of Durán. Taxi drivers refused to enter, fearing they would be robbed or kidnapped, he said. Even the police didn’t feel safe.
The gangs have threatened small business owners like Ms. Garacoia, who said she closed the store she had run for years after receiving a call demanding payment of millions of dollars, known as vacunaor vaccine.
“I had to take the sign down and close down immediately,” he said.
Just as the people of Guayaquil have changed to adapt to the violence – staying indoors, getting pit bulls – so has the city’s physical appearance. The houses have become cages, entangled in bars two or three stories high.
Ángel Chávez, 14, sat behind the wrought iron bars of a community center in Mount Sinai, part of Guayaquil’s most dangerous district, where more than 500 people were killed last year.
He had mixed feelings about the arrival of the military.
“Maybe it will finally put an end to what we have suffered,” he said.
But, he added, the way soldiers treated teenagers in some videos worried him. “I don’t like it when they abuse them.”
Yet, for many in Guayaquil, the greatest fear is that the military will retreat.
Mrs. Cisneros, the cook who can finally serve meals outside, said: “They don’t have to leave.”
Thalie Ponce contributed to the reporting.
