Chiefs knew of alarms from Alvarado’s shackle

Ecuadornews:

The officials who were dismissed because of the escape of the former Secretary of Communication are summoned to the Prosecutor’s Office to render a version.

Failures in the system of electronic devices (shackles) was one of the causes that facilitated the escape of the former Secretary of Communication, Fernando Alvarado,  last weekend. According to Vanessa Mejía, shift supervisor of the Ministry of Justice at ECU-911, who received the message from WhatsApp that was sent by Alvarado last Saturday, through which he announced his escape, the problem is the system.

She said that “everything was reported to her superiors” and in the particular case of the shackle user (Alvarado), on some occasions he approached technical reviews and even then the system continued to generate alerts, which were system alerts.

Mejía, who along with her work team (5 others) were dismissed from office for this fact, went yesterday to the General Prosecutor’s Office to render version of the investigation carried out by this state agency. Upon her departure, she indicated that she and her team, as an operative part of the surveillance system, reported since 2017 that there were problems in the system.

Those reports with problems would have sent them to the provider, to their superiors in the chain of command they had, but they never answered anything, nor did they solve the problems.

Andrés Benítez, Mejía’s lawyer, said that his client has fulfilled all the functions and roles that correspond to her as a supervisor and that they have been able to determine that the failure is of the system. He indicated that once the facts are clarified he will demand the return of his client to her job.

Four people in charge of shackles

The report of the Comptroller determines four direct people (former Minister of Justice, Ledy Zúñiga, the Ceiec company, the Technology Directorate, and the contract administrator) in seven anomalies in the contracts of the shackles with the Chinese company ( Ceiec) National Electronics Import and Export Corporation.

On August 18, 2016, Zúñiga signed the contract with Ceiec for an amount of $ 13’712,456.45 for the purchase of 4,000 devices. According to the Comptroller’s report, the State official did not verify, among other actions, compliance with the contract stages. In this way, according to the special examination, the platform did not comply with the object of the contract.

The loss is $ 9,598,719.52.

Attorney Cecilia Espinosa believes that the use of shackles is not an effective precautionary measure in the country, because “there is no monitoring or adequate control.” The criterion is shared by Ciro Guzmán, of the board of the Bar Association, who considers that the device became questionable due to irregularities in the contracting process. (I)

Source: https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/judicial/12/fuga-fernandoalvarado-grillete