In Ecuador, President Noboa declares war on Colombian guerrillas
Following the assassination of eleven soldiers in an ambush on May 9, the young Ecuadorian liberal leader, recently re-elected with a security-focused speech, decided to attack the guerrillas who control illegal gold mining on the border with Colombia.
After declaring war on gangs in 2024 , Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa extended this conflict on Thursday, May 15, to Colombian guerrillas operating on the border between the two countries, "as part of the fight against terrorism," reports the online media Primicias .
Freshly re-elected after adopting a security-focused discourse during the campaign that has so far failed to stem the violence plaguing this Andean country of 18.1 million people, the young liberal leader has ordered the deployment of 1,500 soldiers to combat the Border Commandos, accused of the massacre on Friday, May 9, of eleven soldiers patrolling an illegal gold mining area in the Amazon.
The Oliver Sinisterra Front – another dissident group that refused to submit to the peace agreement signed in 2016 by the Colombian government with the FARC – and the Comuneros del Sur, from the ELN guerrilla group, will also be considered organized armed groups “due to their involvement in the internal armed conflict in Ecuadorian territory.” And therefore, they will be fought by both the army and the police, according to the decree.
Once considered a haven of peace in a troubled region, Ecuador reached the highest homicide rate in the Americas in 2024, with 39 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.
This violence is partly linked to alliances formed between dissident FARC groups and local gangs such as the Lobos, the Choneros and the Tiguerones, in order to export cocaine to the United States, which before the peace agreement passed through routes controlled by Colombian Marxist guerrillas.
Taking advantage of the weakness of a corrupt state and the resources of drug trafficking, but also of illegal gold mining and extortion, these groups have begun a “transition to a phase of criminal insurrection where criminal groups directly fight the Ecuadorian state,” in order “to impose a criminal domination similar to that which takes place in certain territories of Mexico or Colombia,” Primicias warns in another article .
Courrier International
