“Socalj” for Borderland Beat
The man, named only as Jaime Enrique S.C., was armed and carrying a large sum of money when police stopped his luxury car in the port city of Puerto Bolívar.
Gunmen believed to belong to his gang opened fire as the officers transferred Jaime S.C. to police headquarters. One policeman was injured in the shooting. Soldiers deployed to guard the police HQ where the suspect was locked up were later also fired upon.
The gang is also thought to have links with the Mexican Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), for which it smuggles cocaine from Colombia through Ecuador’s port cities to the US and Europe.
Ecuador has been engulfed by a wave of violence which has seen its murder rate quadruple between 2018 and 2022. Earlier this year, the prominent Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated, allegedly by the rival gang Los Choneros, whom he accused of working for the Sinaloa Cartel. The US is offering $5 million for information on the attack’s masterminds. The main assassin was killed at the scene, and 7 others arrested were recently killed inside prisons.
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On his first full day in office, he repealed a policy that allowed for the possession of small amounts of drugs, arguing that it had encouraged micro-trafficking in schools and “created an entire generation of drug-addicted children.”
Source BBC