Luis Sarmiento went out on a March morning to buy bread with his grandson in his hometown of Duran when he found two decapitated and handcuffed bodies in the street and tried to prevent the child from seeing the horrific scene, realizing the message left by the drug dealers.
“I closed my grandson’s eyes, went home, closed the windows and didn’t know anything after that,” says the 78-year-old pensioner, who lived for 16 years in the Cerro Las Cabras slum in Doran, the city. out of 200,000 near the port of Guayaquil (west).
A former police chief told AFP, on condition of anonymity, that drug smuggling has spread in the hillside area that has become a “hotbed of assassins”.
Gangs recruit boys as young as ten to sell drugs. “First they sell them, then they supply them with weapons, and they become hired killers,” Duran police chief Colonel Jorge Hadati said.
At the Los Largartos hideout of one of Doran’s gangs, authorities confiscated several crocodile stuffed toys. The police believe that in order to get closer to the children and subsequently lure them into their criminal network, the gangs advertise by distributing toys that are mentioned in the name of their network. Of the 230 offenders arrested in Duran between January and April 2022, the vast majority were minors or barely of legal age. “Despite their young age, they committed four or five murders,” says Colonel Hadati. Violence has become a daily occurrence in Cerro Las Cabras.
In February, two bodies were found hanging from a footbridge. Since October 2021, about 10 mutilated, hanged or decapitated bodies have been dumped on public display in a brutal Mexican cartel-style settlement. The killings are the fruit of a war between rival gangs for control of the local smuggling market, which, according to official figures, can bring in $1.8 million a month in the city of Duran alone. Since January, 363 people have died in drug-related crimes in Durán and the neighboring cities of Samborondon and Guayaquil, the country’s main port and staging post for clandestine cocaine shipments to Europe and the US.
pharmacy
On the slopes of Cerro Las Cabras, about thirty police officers search cars for drugs or weapons. In the neighborhood, mounted police are looking for a man.
Neighbors monitor security operations remotely without leaving their homes or participating in a conversation. And silence is the master of the situation here.
Colonel Hadati says the town is a “pharmacy”. “Families live off the sale of drugs or receive money from the mafia, while the rest remain silent, fearing” reprisals, he added.
During a recent raid in Cerro Las Cabras, the police were backed by the army as part of a state of emergency declared by the government in three provinces, including Guayas, where Duran is located, to counter the mafia.
“The gangs are playing cat and mouse with us,” Sgt. Washington Reyes said. They use children and equip them with “lighter sized” walkie-talkies to inform them of these operations.
The leaders of the Los Choneros gang come from Cerro Las Cabras. The Los Choneros gang is also involved in the brutal violence that rocked the nation’s overcrowded prisons for months as the gangs settled scores.
Forty-four prisoners were killed on Monday at the Bellavista detention center in the province of Santo Domingo de los Cajelas, 80 kilometers west of Quito, in clashes between two rival local gangs.
Since February 2021, some 400 prisoners have been killed in these clashes for control of the prison.
