QUITO, Ecuador — Five people died and 16
were injured in an explosion Sunday in the Ecuadoran port city of
Guayaquil in
an attack the government blamed on organized crime, officials said.
اضافة اعلان
Interior Minister
Patricio Carrillo said “organized-crime mercenaries”, long involved in illicit
drug traffic, were “now attacking with explosives”.
“It is a declaration of war against the state,”
Carrillo added on Twitter.
Eight houses and two cars were destroyed in the
blast in Guayaquil, the country’s second largest city, according to the
Secretariat for Risk Management.
Few other details were immediately available.
Located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two
largest cocaine producers, Ecuador is facing a drug-fueled crime wave that has
produced scenes of horror, including decapitated bodies hanging from bridges.
Tensions between rival drug gangs have reached into
Ecuador’s prisons, where clashes and massacres have claimed at least 400 lives
since February 2021.
“Either we confront it (organized crime) together,
or society will pay an even higher price,” Carrillo said.
Ecuador in 2020 accounted for 6.5 percent of all the
cocaine seized in the world, according to the latest UN figures.
And last year, the nation of 18 million saw its
murder rate — 14 homicides per 100,000 people — soar to nearly twice the 2020
rate.
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