2023-08-13 03:01:00
More than 4,000 Ecuadorian police and military officers staged an intervention this Saturday in a prison in the southwest of the country, to organize the transfer of the leader of the “Los Choneros” cartel, who had threatened presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, who was finally assassinated this week.
The uniformed men entered the Guayaquil Zonal Detention Center Number 8, heavily armed and in armored military vehicles, where the head of the criminal group José Adolfo Macías remains. The transfer had already been previously approved by the authorities, but the assassination of the candidate ended up speeding up the procedure and it will take place on Sunday.
This deployment took place in the midst of the state of emergency declared after the murder of Villavicencio, after the wave of incidents that occurred at the end of last month in the nearby Litoral Penitentiary that led to the worst prison massacre in the country’s history: 31 deaths. and 14 missing.
Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso promoted the transfer of the drug leader to La Roca prison “for the safety of citizens and detainees.” “Ecuador is going to recover peace and security. If violent reactions are generated, we will act with all the force of the State,” said the president.
The threat
Better known by the alias “Fito”, Macías was sentenced to 34 years in prison for organized crime, drug trafficking and murder. His nickname became media in Ecuador since Wednesday, after the shooting of Fernando Villavicencio in Quito, who was second in the intention to vote according to the polls.
The 59-year-old politician had denounced a week before that the gang leader had threatened him with death. One of the warnings, he said, came to him through a political ally in the coastal province of Manabí, where the town of Chone is where the band was born. An “emissary with the alias ‘Fito'” contacted him, Villavicencio explained. It was “to tell him that if I keep mentioning ‘Los Choneros’, they are going to break (murder) me,” he told the Vis a Vis program.
The authorities did not clarify who paid the hit men who shot the candidate. So far, there are six, all Colombians, detained as alleged material authors of the murder. They are in pretrial detention by order of a judge, while a seventh man, also a Colombian national, died the same day of the attack in an exchange of shots.
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