Ecuador used to be such a nice place to visit and decide on retiring to if you were an expat looking for a new place to call home.  Living is inexpensive.  They have the US dollar.  The weather is great.  The scenery is a postcard.  They have mountain or beach climate weather.  It’s a great place right?  El Salvador has been cleaning up their country as of late, getting rid of gangs and trouble makers.  Are they all moving to Ecuador these days?  The mayor of a coastal town in Ecuador was shot dead, the police reported in the midst of a state of emergency declared in the country to stop violence linked to drug trafficking.  Brigitte García, mayor of the San Vicente resort, in the province of Manabí (southwest), was murdered along with one of her officials.  

During the early hours of the morning, “two people without vital signs, with gunshot wounds, were identified inside a vehicle,” the police said on their X social network account.  The crime occurred in the midst of the state of emergency that has been in force in Ecuador since January, when a drug trafficking attack occurred after the escape of the leader of the Los Choneros gang, Adolfo Macías, alias Fito, from the Guayaquil prison. Then, President Daniel Noboa declared the country in an internal armed conflict and branded around twenty drug organizations as “terrorists” and “belligerents,” deploying the Armed Forces to subdue them. 

Ecuador's youngest Mayor, García, 27 years old, was part of the Citizen Revolution movement, led by former socialist president Rafael Correa (2007-2017), who spoke out about what happened.  “If it is so hard for you, I imagine how your families must feel. I have no words,” the former president wrote in X.  This was an assassination.  For her part, former presidential candidate Luisa González, from the same party, stated: “In shock, no one is safe in Ecuador.”  In August of last year, presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was shot as he left a meeting with supporters.  He had reported threats from the leader of a drug gang.  Months before, the mayor of the coastal city of Manta (southwest), Agustín Intriago, was also shot dead. 

In addition to politicians, prosecutors have also been victims of violence. The most recent case was the murder in Guayaquil of César Suárez, who was investigating the wife of escaped trafficker Fito.  Located in the middle of Colombia and Peru, the largest cocaine producers in the world, Ecuador has become a logistics center for shipping drugs to the United States and Europe.  Within the small nation, criminal gangs associated with Mexican and Colombian cartels compete to the death for trafficking routes and power in prisons, where some 460 inmates have died since 2021.  The homicide rate also skyrocketed in the country, once considered an island of peace.  Between 2018 and 2023 the rate went from 6 to a record 46 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.