Cornered by drug violence, the government of Daniel Noboa launched a ‘war’ against the gangs, but it also generates concern about the effects on human rights.

President Daniel Noboa delivering vests to police officers in Quito, on January 22, 2024.
The escape from a Guayaquil prison of drug trafficker Adolfo Macías or alias ‘Fito’, at the time sanctioned by the US, gave rise to a strong offensive by criminal organizations in the streets and prisons that left at least 20 dead. The wave of violence in Ecuador was exactly a month ago, on January 9.
Given what happened, President Daniel Noboa’s immediate response was to order a state of emergency for 60 days to mobilize the military, but this fueled the violence even more with kidnappings of uniformed officers and prison guards, explosions, attacks on police stations and even the armed takeover of a television channel in Guayaquil in full transmission.
Hours later, Noboa decreed a state of ” internal armed conflict “ and ordered the military to “neutralize” 22 drug trafficking organizations, which he called “terrorists” and belligerents.
What has happened since then? In a month of ‘war’ against drugs, police and military have arrested more than 6,600 people and of this total, only 241 are suspected terrorists.
But in the midst of these arrests, which are reminiscent of Nayib Bukele’s much applauded ‘hard hand’ in El Salvador, the American media The New York Times exposes two aspects of Noboa’s security plan.
On the one hand, interventions in the streets have “reduced violence and provided a precarious sense of security to places like Guayaquil, a city of 2.7 million inhabitants and a key port for drug trafficking, boosting government approval to 76% “in a recent survey.”
Although from the other shore, there is also criticism for the alleged abuses of the military and police. “What is increasing are cases of serious human rights violations,” says an expert quoted by the media, Fernando Bastias, of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights of Guayaquil.
As a reference, the newspaper, in its English and Spanish versions, refers to videos on social networks, where young people in the streets are beaten and “a teenager forced to rub a tattoo on his body until his chest bleeds.”
Ecuador is not El Salvador.
In the newspaper article, another expert cited, a professor at Cornell University, Gustavo Flores-Macías, indicates that Ecuador can well be called ” a second laboratory for Bukele’s policies.”
“People are so desperate that they buy into the need for these heavy-handed policies to reduce crime,” says Flores-Macías.
And he adds that the cost of this tough policy will represent a high cost for civil liberties.
One of Noboa’s emergencies is the construction of two new megaprisons, similar to the prisons in El Salvador, but about which very little is known.
Asked about these ‘comparisons’ with the millennial president of El Salvador, Noboa responded with a video on his TikTok account, a social network that he uses to give government announcements before official media.
“I believe in the Ecuadorian way, I believe in the Noboa way,” says the Ecuadorian president.
Precisely, regarding the Central American country, where Bukele has just been re-elected, Chatham House researcher Christopher Sabatini warns that Ecuador is fighting a different enemy.
“El Salvador was never important for drug trafficking. (…) It is simply too small,” Sabatini told the newspaper.
While Ecuador is a key territory for the logistics, transportation and trade of cocaine, and where criminal gangs have allies in the Mexican cartels and even the Albanian mafia.
Thus, in the midst of the security crisis, where before there were bodies hanging from bridges or thrown in the streets of Durán, today the military operations and arrests are applauded by the majority of citizens.