The President, Daniel Noboa Azin, attended the National Assembly to present the 2024 report to the nation.
Noboa, who arrived at the Legislative Palace of the National Assembly at 11:00, began by pointing out the absence in the chamber of the Correista bloc, who he said had voted for all the projects he sent to the Assembly and that he did not doubt that they did not They missed a word of his speech from their homes.
He then praised the police and military in their actions against organized crime gangs and called them “the true heroes of Ecuador,” after different organizations have denounced human rights violations by state forces under the “armed conflict.” internal” declared by the president against criminal gangs.
In his first report to the nation, Noboa assured the National Assembly that the Police and the Armed Forces of Ecuador” came out to defend our families, our freedom and our homeland. “
Before appearing in the Legislative Assembly, the head of state participated in the military ceremony to commemorate the 202 years of the Battle of Pichincha, which sealed the independence of Ecuador, and where he noted that now “the Armed Forces are once again the protagonists, but This time, they face a dangerous enemy, whose weapons are violence, corruption and chaos.
Police and military, “heroes”
Noboa praised the bravery, sacrifice and commitment of the military institution during the “internal armed conflict” with which his Government began to classify criminal gangs as terrorist groups and non-state belligerent actors.
“They expose their lives in the streets, squares and prisons with a single objective: to return freedom and peace to Ecuador ,” he said.
In his speech before the Assembly after having served six months in office, the president assured that his Government had to make “hard and profound decisions that no one had risked taking before but that were necessary to guide the country towards a new Ecuador”.
“We have applied security measures with determination, our goal is to start building a country where tranquility and security are the norm and not the exception,” he said.
January terrorism
Noboa highlighted that “January 9, 2024 is a date that the country will never be able to forget”, when he made the decision to elevate the fight against organized crime to the category of “internal armed conflict” after a series of attacks and violent actions. of criminal groups that included the takeover of the TC Televisión channel by a group of armed men during a live broadcast, as well as simultaneous riots in several prisons in the country with about 200 hostages.
At the same time, he decreed a state of exception at the national level to mobilize the Armed Forces in operations against organized crime and militarize prisons, the epicenter of the crisis of violence that the country is experiencing since until then many of them were dominated by criminal gangs.
“(On January 9) we experienced the extent of the horror of terrorism in our country, and after having dematerialized certain devices, we saw that there was even an attempted coup d’état,” Noboa said about an alleged conspiracy against which there was already mentioned above.
«I had two options: do nothing, as always (had happened), or act. There was no room for lukewarmness, and after five months those efforts have paid off“, he said.
The speech lasted twenty minutes and was interspersed by three videos, each lasting a minute and a half.
Previously, President Noboa had attended the military ceremony for the Battle of Pichincha. Hundreds of cardboard effigies of the president have appeared around the Legislative Palace so that his supporters can hold them as banners.
