world

June 30, 2022

image source, Archyde.com

Both parties signed an understanding thanks to the mediation of the Ecuadorian Episcopal Conference, which culminated in the cessation of the demonstrations.

“We have achieved the supreme value to which we all aspire: peace in our country,” Lasso wrote on his Twitter account.

deal details

Among the points agreed by both parties, the most complicated was the one related to the price of fuel.

The government agreed to a discount of 15 cents per gallon for subsidized fuels. The indigenous groups originally demanded a reduction of 40 cents.

image source, Archyde.com

The understanding also included the commitment of the Ecuadorian government to repeal a decree that promoted oil activity in the Amazon and stop mining concessions in protected natural areas, intangible zones, water recharge areas and ancestral territories of indigenous peoples.

Days earlier, the Lasso government had announced others economic relief, such as increased monthly subsidies for the poorest families and debt forgiveness.

The president also declared a state of emergency for the country’s public health system and promised to double the budget for intercultural education for indigenous communities.

image source, EPA

Leonidas Iza, president of Conaie, admitted that the agreement document does not include all the demands, but stressed that it has “important achievements.” He also called for protesters not to be criminalized.

“Enough of continuing to stigmatize and racialize social fighters. Enough of calling us terrorists,” added Iza, who warned that they will reconvene mobilizations if they do not see the agreement fulfilled in 90 days.

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Security authorities presented on Thursday three gang members accused of murder of an inspector and two agents of the National Civil Police (PNC) in Santa Ana. A fourth subject was killed by the police during the same capture operation.

According to the Police, the subjects were hidden in an inn in Chalchuapa.

The director of the PNC, Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, said that among those detained is the leader of the clique responsible for the homicides. They will go to preventive detention and then they will be transferred to the penal center determined by the corresponding court, he added.

Chicas added that patrols will continue in different areas to dismantle “any criminal structure.”

“Five were the 18-S terrorists who assassinated our heroes. One of them was wounded in the confrontation and is in hospital custody,” President Nayib Bukele reported through his Twitter account.

In total there are 5 gang members involved in the murders, identified as: José Héctor Bernal Colocho, alias “Negro”, who has been hospitalized since the day of the event; Gabriela Esmeralda Solís, Geovanny Chigüila Olmedo, alias “Chimba”, and Gustavo G., a minor; the latter captured this Thursday. While Rodolfo Alfredo Mejía, alias “Robiño”, was killed by the agents.

SEE: Gang members had usurped a house where they killed three police officers in Santa Ana

Bernal Colocho and Chigüila Olmedo have been in prison, according to court documents.

“These murderers were hiding in an inn, when our special forces entered, the terrorist Robiño fired at our agents, but he was killed instantly. Our policemen are unharmed,” added the president.

SEE: Who was Franklin Lemus? The policeman murdered along with two of his companions in Santa Ana

On Tuesday, June 28, the inspector and two agents were gunned down in an ambush by gang members in the community of La Realidad, in that municipality.

SEE: Tacubenses mourn the agent killed during an armed attack in Santa Ana

The victims were identified as Carlos Mauricio Velásquez Rodríguez, inspector; Franklin Antonio Lemus Majico and agent Marta Lisseth Alas González, who belonged to the 911 Emergency System.

The version of a police source coincides with that of the neighbors: the police had received information that a gang member was hiding in a house in that sector, supposedly he is the one who remains injured in police custody and who was identified as José Héctor Bernal Colocho, aka “The Black”.

While proceeding with that gang member, the policemen were surprised with bullets, with long weapons by other cronies of the captured one. The volume of fire from the gang members was so intense that the police officers did not have time to react to defend themselves.

The French gendarmerie carried out a crackdown on Monday once morest a “large-scale” counterfeiting network which sold low-end wines or wines from other regions for Bordeaux. The damage is estimated at ‘hundreds of thousands of bottles’.

On Monday, a hundred gendarmes arrested in the Médoc and in seven departments around twenty people suspected of having taken part in this trafficking in counterfeit Bordeaux wines, the scale of which “can already be estimated at several hundred thousand bottles”, a Public prosecutor Frédérique Porterie told AFP on Friday.

Three of these suspects, including the “main instigator” were presented on Wednesday before an examining magistrate and indicted for “organized gang scams and money laundering”, “deception on the goods” and “falsification of foodstuffs”. They were released under judicial supervision with an obligation to pay bail of 20,000 to 50,000 euros.

While investigating drug trafficking, the gendarmes of the Gironde came across counterfeit material last September, such as “false labels”, detailed the prosecution in a press release.

Then in October, fake Bordeaux wines were spotted in the Sarthe, leading the gendarmes to make the link with a counterfeit reported months earlier in the Médoc.

‘By whole pallets’

The investigation, opened in November, revealed ‘large-scale fraud organized by the owner of a vineyard in the Médoc’, also a merchant, who obtained wine through ‘Spanish contacts’.

He had set up “a network of official and unofficial distributors made up of companies, retirees, auto-entrepreneurs” which made it possible to sell fake Bordeaux “by whole pallets” in several departments, according to the prosecution. “Important orders”, i.e. several thousand bottles, were also “destined for mass distribution or foreign countries”.

Customers thought they were buying Bordeaux châteaux ‘whose name and label inspired confidence, at prices that sometimes defied all competition’ while the bottles contained ‘low-end wines or wines from fairly distant lands’, underlined the prosecutor. During the searches, ‘a dozen vehicles’ and ‘a large volume of wine’ were seized.

/ATS