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Lenin Moreno lays 600 troops to San Lorenzo after terrorist attack
Posted On 29 Jan 2018
Ecuadornews:
The president of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, ordered the transfer of 600 security personnel to the province of Esmeraldas, bordering Colombia, where a terrorist attack occurred with a “car bomb” in the San Lorenzo police force, which left 28 injured slight, informed the National Secretariat of Communication (Secom).
The governor decreed the state of emergency, for sixty days, in the cantons of San Lorenzo and Eloy Alfaro to strengthen the safety of its inhabitants. In a statement, the Secom, which does not specify to which institution belong the 600 troops that will be sent to Esmeraldas, highlights that the Government strongly condemned the explosion of the “car bomb”, registered early Saturday morning in front of a police installation, in the canton of San Lorenzo.
He considered “this terrorist attack, implemented by gangs of drug traffickers and organized crime, does not compromise its policy of fighting this transnational scourge” in its different facets, such as drug trafficking and money laundering.
He recalled that the state of emergency in the cantons of San Lorenzo and Eloy Alfaro establishes security zones and suspends the rights to the inviolability of domicile, transit, association and assembly. “Facts like these are raised by the strong and successful work that has been done in the area in the direct fight against organized crime,” Interior Minister César Navas said.
“Ecuador is a country of peace and its authorities are committed to maintaining Ecuador as a country of peace,” said Navas, who recalled that in recent days more than seven and a half tons of chemical precursors have been seized (used in the preparation of drugs) almost a ton of drugs and that there are seven people detained linked to drug trafficking.
Navas pointed out that the different state bodies work in collaboration with their counterparts in Colombia, in order to determine the causes of this “act of terror”.
He recalled that the neighboring country is in a process of internal pacification in which “residual” groups subsist that have chosen not to follow that path and “are forming criminal bands that are dedicated to drug trafficking.”
He stressed that the presence of the Ecuadorian State in the border area, now affected, “would have generated reprisals or attempts of intimidation on the part of these groups,” Secom reported. (I)
