Cocaine Trade and Gang Violence Strike Hard in Once-Peaceful #Ecuador
▻https://www.wsj.com/articles/cocaine-trade-and-gang-violence-strike-hard-in-once-peaceful-ecuador-bad953c8?s
Local media outlets say that death threats have led them to stop publishing the bylines of reporters who write about crime. Parents said that soldiers recently stood guard outside schools in Durán after a gang threatened to kill students. Some wealthy residents pay as much as $30,000 to bulletproof their cars, according to Lautaro Ojeda Salvador, the owner of a company that provides the service.
Killings in #Guayaquil are up about 65% in the first four months of 2023 from a year earlier, according to the police, making it one of the world’s most violent cities. That means Guayaquil is on track to have more homicides per capita than cities such as Juárez, Mexico, and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, had last year, according to the Citizen Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, a Mexico-based organization that tracks the world’s most dangerous cities.