Since Ecuador’s president declared war on gangs last month, soldiers with rifles have flooded the streets of Guayaquil, a sprawling Pacific coast city that has been at the center of the nation’s decades-long descent into violence.
They pull men from buses and cars looking for drugs, guns and gang tattoos and patrol the streets enforcing a nighttime curfew. The city is on edge, its men and teenage boys potential targets for troops and police tasked with taking down powerful gangs that have joined forces with international cartels to make Ecuador a hub for the global drug trade.
However, when people see soldiers passing by, many applaud or applaud them. “We applaud the iron fist, we celebrate it,” said Guayaquil Mayor Aquiles Alvarez. “Help bring peace.”
In early January, Guayaquil was hit by a wave of violence that could prove to be a turning point in the country’s long security crisis: Gangs attacked the city after authorities moved to take over Ecuador’s prisons, which were largely controlled by gangs.
Policemen were kidnapped, explosives were detonated, and in one episode broadcast live, a dozen armed men briefly took over a major television station.
The president, Daniel Noboa, declared an internal conflict, an extraordinary step taken when the state was attacked by an armed group. He deployed troops against the gangs, which have taken over much of Ecuador, fighting for control of cocaine trafficking routes and turning it from one of South America’s most peaceful countries to its deadliest.
Ecuador’s top military commander has warned that every member of the gang is now a “military target”.
Mr. Noboa’s aggressive response has reduced violence and brought a precarious sense of security to places like Guayaquil, a city of 2.7 million people and a key drug-trafficking port, prompting the government’s approval to 76 percent in a recent national survey.
It has also raised alarm among human rights activists.
“We don’t see anything new or innovative,” said Fernando Bastias of Guayaquil’s Permanent Commission for the Defense of Human Rights. “What we are seeing is an increase in cases of serious human rights violations.”
Ecuador’s approach has drawn comparisons with El Salvador, whose young leader, Nayib Bukele, has largely dismantled its vicious gangs, earning him a landslide re-election and admiration across Latin America. But critics say he has also trampled human rights and the rule of law, ordering mass arrests that ensnared innocent people.
“Ecuador is an important case because it’s almost like a second laboratory for Bukele’s policies,” said Gustavo Flores-Macías, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell University who specializes in Latin America. “People are so desperate that they are confessing the need for these iron-fisted crime-fighting policies.”
The policies may be effective, but, he added, “the cost to civil liberties is high.”
Like Mr. Bukele, Mr. Noboa, 36, wants to build big prisons and his social media posts include music and images of inmates in handcuffs and exercising to the waist. He proclaims it “The Noboa Way”.
But there are significant differences, said Christopher Sabatini, senior researcher for Latin America at Chatham House, a think tank in London. While Mr. Bukele despises democracy, Mr. Noboa “has portrayed his government as a democracy under siege,” Mr. Sabatini said.
Mr. Noboa also faces a different opponent, said Will Freeman, a fellow in Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“El Salvador has never been important for drug trafficking,” he said. “It is too small”. Ecuador, by contrast, is now central to the global cocaine trade, he said, with links to cartels from Mexico to Europe. As a result, her gangs have millions to arm themselves to fight the authorities.
However, he added, “we see Noboa moving toward a strategy of mass arrests.”
Since the president declared war on gangs, authorities in Ecuador have arrested more than 6,000 people.
In Guayaquil, soldiers and police destroy camera systems installed by gangs to monitor entire neighborhoods, break into areas once off-limits to police and break down doors to uncover caches of weapons and explosives.
The repression had some effect.
From December to January, the number of murders in Guayaquil dropped 33 percent, from 187 to 125. Outside the city’s morgue, Cheyla Jurado, a street vendor selling juice and pastries to families waiting to retrieve bodies, said that the crowds had visibly thinned out.
“Now, it’s car accidents, drownings,” he said.
At the city’s largest hospital, the number of patients arriving with gunshot wounds and other violence-related injuries has dropped from five a day to just one every three days, said Dr. Rodolfo Zevallos, an emergency physician.
Relief from the bloodshed — while still in its early stages — has many roots for the young president.
“We can sit outside at night,” said Janet Cisneros, who sells home-cooked meals in Guayaquil’s Suburbio neighborhood. “Before, we couldn’t — we were completely stuck inside.”
Mr Noboa, heir to a banana fortune, was elected in November to complete his predecessor’s term, which was cut short when he dissolved parliament, prompting snap elections.
In January, as the violence erupted, he traded his business suits and shy smile for a grimace, smarts and a black leather jacket, announcing that Ecuador would no longer take orders from “narco-terrorist gangs.”
The hardline message is intended for Ecuadorians, who will vote for president again next year, said Mr. Flores-Macías, the political scientist, but it is also intended to win support from international leaders — particularly President Biden. Mr. Noboa, he said, “clearly sees that he needs the support — the guidance, the funding and the help — of the United States.”
So far, the Biden administration has provided Ecuador with equipment and training along with about $93 million in military and humanitarian aid.
Ecuadorian officials have said the military is vital to the recovery neighborhoods from gangs that have become the de facto authorities, recruiting boys as young as 12 to transport drugs, kidnap and kill.
Mr. Noboa’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
In Guayaquil, police paint murals depicting gang leaders. Soldiers conducting street raids lecture young men found with small bags of marijuana about the dangers of drugs or a life of crime.
However, videos have surfaced online showing authorities also using harsher tactics: men and boys who gather in the streets are beaten on the head or forced to kiss each other. In a widely shared video, a teenager is forced to rub off a tattoo until his chest is bloody.
In prisons where the military has been sent to wrest control from gangs, similar abuses occur, according to advocates and inmates’ families.
“They have the prisoners beat worse than Jesus Christ,” said Fernanda Lindao, whose son is serving a sentence for robbery at Guayaquil’s Litoral Penitentiary. “There are no human rights for prisoners.”
However, videos of the arrests are extremely popular, with many Ecuadorians praising the soldiers and the president.
“The public is applauding what’s happening,” said Mr. Álvarez, the mayor of Guayaquil, “and they’re not applauding it because they’re bad people, but because they’re tired of all the violence they’ve been through.”
To explain their support for Mr. Noboa’s tactics, many describe how bad things had become.
“They killed here, they dumped bodies,” said Rosa Elena Guachicho, who lives in Durán, a suburb of Guayaquil with unpaved roads and no drinking water. “A month ago they found one in a pillowcase, cut to pieces.”
Dolores Garacoya he said gangs had taken over Duran. Taxi drivers refused to get in, fearing they would be robbed or kidnapped, he said. The police didn’t feel safe either.
Gangs have threatened small business owners like Ms. Garacoia, who said she closed her years-long store after receiving a call demanding a payment of thousands of dollars, known as vacuumor vaccine.
“I had to take the sign down and close right away,” he said.
Just as the people of Guayaquil have changed to adapt to the violence—living indoors, getting pitbulls—so has the city’s physical appearance. The houses have become cages, tangled in bars that rise two or three stories.
Angel Chavez, 14, sat behind wrought-iron bars of a community center in Monte Sinai, part of Guayaquil’s most dangerous district, where more than 500 people were killed last year.
He had mixed feelings about the arrival of the army.
“Maybe it will put an end to what we are suffering,” he said.
But, he added, the way the soldiers treated the teenagers in some of the videos troubled him. “I don’t like it when they abuse them.”
However, for many in Guayaquil, their greatest fear is the withdrawal of the military.
Ms. Cisneros, the cook who can finally serve meals outside, said: “They shouldn’t go.”
Thalie Ponce contributed to the report.
