Ecuador transferred a strong gang leader, accused of threatening a presidential applicant ahead of he was slain, to a highest security jail by means of a enormous military and law enforcement procedure on Saturday, officers said.
At dawn some 4,000 heavily armed agents entered Jail 8 in Guayaquil in southwestern Ecuador, where the head of the effective Los Choneros prison team, Jose Adolfo Macias, alias “Fito,” was remaining held.
Pictures shared by safety forces confirmed a bearded person in his underwear, with his arms on his head in some photographs and lying on the flooring with arms tied in other folks.
Ecuadoran President Guillermo Lasso reported on social media internet site X, formerly recognized as Twitter, that “Fito” experienced been transferred to La Roca, a 150-man or woman highest stability prison that is section of the very same big penitentiary complicated he was now in.
The gang leader experienced managed at minimum a single cellblock in the prison from which he was eliminated.
Ecuador has been under a condition of unexpected emergency following the shock assassination Wednesday of journalist and anti-corruption crusader Fernando Villavicencio.
Lasso has blamed the murder on organized crime, and Villavicencio had complained of obtaining demise threats from Macias.
A week right before the 59-calendar year-outdated was killed, he experienced mentioned that “Fito” was threatening him.
Villavicencio explained to a community system that an “emissary” of the gang leader experienced contacted him and warned “that if I proceed… mentioning Los Choneros, they are heading to crack me.”
On Saturday his social gathering announced that his operating mate, Andrea Gonzalez, would get his area in the August 20 election.
Gonzalez, 36, is an environmental advocate who has fought in certain for the defense of oceans, forests and mangroves.
– ‘Unjustifiable violence’ –
Villavicencio drew the ire of gangs and drug traffickers for his investigations.
Six Colombians have been arrested in his murder, although a seventh was killed in a shootout with his bodyguards. Authorities have not explained who hired and paid out the hitmen.
“Fito” experienced been sentenced to 34 several years in jail for arranged criminal offense, drug trafficking and murder.
Prisons have turn into the centre of operations for drug trafficking in Ecuador.
Extra than 430 inmates have died violently because 2021, dozens of them dismembered and incinerated amid disputes concerning rival gangs.
The worldwide local community has condemned Villavicencio’s murder, which include the UN, United States and European Union.
On Saturday, Pope Francis rejected the violence plaguing Ecuador in a information to the Archbishop of Quito, Alfredo Espinoza.
The pope condemned “with all his power” the “struggling brought on by unjustifiable violence.”
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