- Atahualpa Amerise @atareports
- BBC News World
image source, Citizen revolution
The murdered candidate Omar Menéndez.
Omar Menéndez, 41, won the mayoral election on Sunday in the coastal city of Puerto López, some 150 km northwest of Guayaquil.
The candidate of Revolución Ciudadana (the leftist party of former President Rafael Correa) received 46.22% of the vote compared to 21.41% for his biggest rival, current mayor Javier Pincay, in this town of some 20,000 inhabitants.
Menéndez might not celebrate the victory because they killed him hours before the polls opened in the sectional elections of February 5.
Armed men broke into the room where the candidate was finalizing the preparations for the day on Saturday followingnoon and opened fire.
A 16-year-old teenager was also killed in the attack and two other people were injured.
Father of two children, Menéndez was a business administrator and operated businesses in the telecommunications and information technology sector.
After his posthumous victory in the elections, the mayoralty will be granted to another representative of the Citizen Revolution in Puerto López.
The rise of the hit men
image source, Getty Images
The police are investigating the possible motive for the crime, one more in the increasingly serious crime wave associated with organized crime that Ecuador suffers.
Luis Córdova-Alarcón, coordinator of the Research, Order, Conflict and Violence program at the Central University of Ecuador (UCE), warns that the use of hit men as a political and economic weapon has become widespread.
“Street gangs that sell their contract killing services to the highest bidder have multiplied, and that highest bidder can be from a political opponent who wants to get an opponent out of the way even criminal organizations that aim to control certain local spaces,” he explains in conversation with BBC Mundo.
And it is that Menéndez was not the only politician assassinated before the elections.
two weeks ago too They shot dead the aspiring mayor of the coastal town of SalinasJulio Cesar Farachio.
Police arrested a suspect in the murder, who had previously threatened the 45-year-old candidate.
The suspect had recently been released from prison following serving a sentence for drug trafficking, according to local media.
To these cases are added the threats during the campaign to numerous candidateswho in many cases had to use a police escort to go out into the street.
“As criminal violence and its impunity grow in the face of a State incapable of resolving homicides, a gap opens for the hired killers to become a political tool for social control once morest opponents, opponents, social leaders, and activists,” analyzes Córdova. -Alarcon.
More violence in ports and coasts
image source, Getty Images
The coastal city of Guayaquil has become one of the most insecure in Ecuador.
The violence of organized crime has become more entrenched in the coastal towns, from Guayaquil to Esmeraldas, passing through the two cities where the murders of the aforementioned candidates took place.
The UCE professor highlights the important role of criminal organizations linked to drug trafficking that dispute control of ports and routes for drug trafficking, mainly cocaine.
“A dispute may occur between two organizations to make a port viable as an access route to a drug trafficking route and that each of the candidates for mayor of a canton may be involved with one of the rival organizations,” he says, by way of hypothesis that would explain some of the cases of political violence in the region.
The academic assures that there is regarding 120 informal ports throughout the west coast of Ecuador that are beyond the control of the government.
From these points, the drug traffickers take the merchandise -especially drugs, but also native species, trafficked people or weapons- in boats to load it on larger vessels on the high seas.
And that is where criminal organizations, he explains, weave their networks with local administrations.
This allows them, for example, “to access money laundering through public procurement carried out by the mayors of small cantons, or handle logistics in those cantons to transport goods and personnel”.
image source, Getty Images
Ecuador’s prisons are the management and decision centers of many criminal organizations, according to experts.
Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso condemned the crimes.
The Lasso administration, which is at its lowest point in popularity (between 12 and 30% support according to surveys) and suffered a resounding defeat in the sectional elections, is proving incapable of containing the criminal escalation that is ravaging the country.
The government proposed a series of amendments to the Constitution that were submitted to a referendum on Sunday, including give green light to extradition of Ecuadorians linked to transnational organized crime.
With the country’s prisons overcrowded by the crime wave, authorities believe that extraditing convicted criminals from maximum-security prisons to the United States would be the safest and most economical option for the Ecuadorian justice system.
Neighboring Colombia amended its constitution in 1997 to that effect and has since sent many high-level drug traffickers to the United States.
In the Colombian case, the authorities allege that the drug lords fear being extradited to US prisons, where they lack ties or influence over the guards and directors.
And Ecuador considered that, in addition to the deterrent function, extradition would help “to dismantle organized crime gangs” so that the country “stops being a paradise for drug traffickers,” the government’s Undersecretary for Regulatory Affairs, Karen, told BBC Mundo. sichel.
However, the proposal to amend the Ecuadorian constitution to allow extradition failed by a narrow margin, with 51% rejecting of the voters.
image source, Getty Images
After only 20 months in office, President Lasso’s popularity is at an all-time low.
President Lasso accepted the result and stated that “when the people speak, it is our duty to analyze, understand and accept it.”
Some experts, however, doubt that the extradition would have served to solve the crime problem that the country suffers.
“The heart of the problem is not attacked, which has to do with medium-term solutions such as generating employment or injecting resources into the economy, something that the government is not doing, as well as short-term decisions, such as allocating resources to attack the problem of the prison crisis,” Ecuadorian political analyst Andrés Chiriboga told BBC Mundo.
Córdova-Alarcón also believes that “the government has lost the control problem because it is not targeting the vulnerabilities it should target.”
“It multiplies the number of police and military on the streets but refuses to understand that organized crime has a lot to do with the capacity building of economic and financial control, which is where the money that feeds these structures is laundered. The financial and economic analysis unit has an annual budget of less than US$50,000,” he says.
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