Massacres Surge as Gangs Atomize in Ecuador

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A recent series of massacres in Ecuador is further evidence that more access to high-powered weapons, heightened impunity, and an atomized criminal landscape are leading to more mass killings.

Ten people were gunned down and dismembered in a mass shooting on December 1 in the province of El Oro, among them nine Colombians and an Ecuadorian national. Just days earlier, on November 28, gunmen killed three people and injured at least three more in Durán at a local soccer pitch.

Massacres — incidents in which three or more people are killed at the same place and time — have risen steadily in Ecuador since 2020, affecting parts of the country previously untouched by extreme acts of violence. Such killings in 2024 are approaching 2023 levels despite Ecuador’s government declaring a “state of internal conflict” and an unprecedented military crackdown on organized crime.

The percentage of murder victims in Ecuador dying in massacres has risen significantly since 2020, spiking from 2% to 15% between 2020 and 2021. Driving this initial phase was a wave of mass killings perpetrated by warring gangs battling for valuable territory within the prison system as they sought to eliminate rivals. In September 2021, a gang clash resulted in 119 deaths in the Latacunga prison. Authorities tallied 68 and 34 victims in other prison massacres that year. Overall, the Ministry of Defense recorded 18 prison massacres between 2021 and 2023.

But so far, in 2024, criminal groups have perpetrated only one massacre in the prison system, while the percentage of total murder victims dying in mass killings in Ecuador has remained high. There are various explanations for this.

To begin with, Ecuador’s criminal groups now have greater access to high-powered, automatic weapons. Spurred by both looser arms ownership regulations and a boom in illegal weapons trafficking, this has exacerbated the evolution of massacres beyond prison walls, providing warring criminal groups with the means to take out large clusters of rivals at once.

“The killing capacity of a gun is so great that there is undoubtedly a close relationship between the availability of guns and the number of deaths,” Carla Álvarez, a professor at Ecuador’s Institute for Higher National Studies (Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales), told InSight Crime.

SEE ALSO:How Ecuador’s Criminals Are Taking Advantage of Private Security Firms

Compounding the issue is the ongoing impunity for violent crimes within Ecuador’s judicial institutions, a dynamic that signals to criminal groups that massacres will go unpunished. Impunity rates for homicide cases exceeded 90% in 2023 in many coastal provinces, El Universo reported, as authorities lack the investigative capacity to keep pace with persistently high murder rates. Even if caught, judicial corruption networks like those exposed by the landmark Metastasis case provide ways around sentences and other legal consequences.

The rise in massacres also comes as increasingly fragmenting gangs fight for their place in the country’s lucrative criminal landscape. Security officials, criminal sources, and security experts told InSight Crime in recent fieldwork in Ecuador that gangs on the streets were cut off from their leaders in the prisons after the military crackdown began in January, leaving them without orders. Many leaders also fled the country in response to the measures.

Ecuador’s criminal groups have since recuperated, albeit in an atomized way. In response to shuffling leadership, many local factions of the Lobos, Choneros, and Tiguerones, for example, have split or changed allegiances, diversifying income sources and exploiting growing criminal economies like extortion, kidnapping, and illegal gold mining.

As a result, conflict and competition between them have increased, and they have frequently turned to the use of massacres to eliminate their enemies and affect the kind of mass defections that have happened inside the penitentiary system. In June 2024, authorities recorded the second-most massacres of any month in Ecuador’s history.

“There’s hostility with all the changes of sides that have taken place,” a local leader of the Ñetas street gang in Guayaquil, who chose to remain anonymous for security reasons, told InSight Crime in May. “Many Choneros have become Lobos, and many Lobos have become Tiguerones. They have mixed among themselves.”

The impact of these shifts is most apparent in gold-producing areas. To make incursions into the industry, groups have consolidated their control over artisanal miners, first extorting their operations and then taking over the mines for themselves, disputing territory with other criminal groups in the process.

The Sierran province of Azuay, a mining hotspot, reported no massacres in 2023 but seven in 2024. In the Amazonian provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana, also mining hubs, authorities recorded nine mass killings so far in 2024, after only 13 in total from 2010 through 2023.

SEE ALSO:As Government Pressure Mounts, Ecuador’s Gangs Strike Gold

Part of the motive for massacres appears to be as a tool for control of civilian populations, Luis Fernando Trejos, a professor at Universidad del Norte who has studied massacres in the Colombian context, told InSight Crime.

“There are zones in which the armed group already controls the territory, and massacres appear as mechanisms of collective punishment for the violation of norms established by the group,” he said.

Local media, for example, has reported on the Colombian Border Command’s (Comandos de la Frontera) dominance over the criminal underworld in Sucumbíos, lying on Ecuador’s northeast border with Colombia. There, the group regulates criminal activity and metes out violence, with Sucumbíos’ police chief telling Primicias on November 9 that murders in the province can be attributed to a “social cleansing” campaign by the Border Command.

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