One of the most recent violent events in the Nueva Prosperina district occurred early this Saturday, January 14, at the Horizontes del Fortín cooperative, when a couple were talking inside a parked car and antisocials arrived in another vehicle from which they were shot.
The man tried to flee: he got out of the car and tried to enter a house, but was finished off by his assailants, who shot him several times in the head. As a result of the attack, Luis Rodríguez Martínez, 34, died; while his companion was injured and she was taken to a health home.
Although it is not an official figure, from January 1 to noon on Sunday the 15th, this newspaper has recorded 32 homicides in the Nueva Prosperina district, a figure that represents 9% of the 373 cases that occurred in all of 2022.
Hence, this is the most conflictive of the twelve districts that are part of Zone 8, made up of Guayaquil, Durán and Samborondón.
Preventive prison for the seven detainees for the crime of businessman Javier Rosero
Throughout this territorial division, at least 80 crimes have been reported so far in 2023, a year that began with a high rate of criminal violence in Zone 8, a jurisdiction that closed the previous period with 1,534 murders.
After the crime of Luis Rodríguez Martínez, in the same area but in the afternoon, a motorcyclist was killed with bullets to the head. His perpetrators were traveling on another motorcycle.
Nueva Prosperina encompasses a large sector of the northwest of the city, much of which arose as irregular settlements that were later formalized and integrated into the map of the Main Port. This is the case of Mount Sinai and other sites on the Perimeter to the west.
On January 4, in the Divino Niño 2 cooperative, in the sector known as Ciudad de Dios, anti-socials entered a house by raising the roof and shot three men from a family with bullets. Not satisfied with this, they took a 15-year-old teenager from there who was then executed at dawn on Casuarina Avenue.
Four days later, violence returned to Nueva Prosperina. The brothers Kevin, Jonathan and Brayan Barberán Ibarra were assassinated in front of their parents in the living room of their house, in the Horizontes del Fortín cooperative.
After this jurisdiction, with thirteen and seven homicides, the Sur and Esteros districts, respectively, are the sectors of Zone 8 with the most violent deaths so far.
Three brothers were executed in Nueva Prosperina despite their parents’ pleas
In the first mentioned district, this Sunday morning there was an attack by hitmen against three collaborators of a company that offers services for a local port. One of them died after being hit by the projectiles.
“What we have is a high level of permissibility from the State, basically because of the issue of impunity. As long as there is impunity, people will believe that this is no man’s land. And that is getting worse and worse, and it is more expensive to bring order to this issue,” says Daniel Pontón, professor and dean of the School of Security and Defense of the Institute of Higher National Studies, about the wave of violence of these first days of 2023.
What is the problem in these sectors?
The specialist believes that there is no strong state presence there and, therefore, criminal structures proliferate: bands, gangs, illegal businesses, micro-trafficking and others. Currently, the actions of these organizations are much more violent than before, but there was already an ecosystem of crime installed, he added.
“Perhaps what was missing from other governments, from the previous ones, was to work more to reduce the opportunity factors that existed in those territories, such as poverty, exclusion, services. What was had in the previous government was a kind of more positive (action) than in the current government, and the Government says so, I do not say it: that the Police and justice lack everything. So, you have an impairment of the State’s control capacity,” said Pontón.
Carlos Sevillano, an expert in national security and political science, estimates that one explanation for why the northwest and south of the city have a high incidence of murders is that they are places where there is a struggle to control the territory and commit crimes such as micro-trafficking, for example.
“There are places that the Police have made known, drug collection places, drug transit places. The largest quantity of drugs in dispute is for transit, not for local consumption; So, within that, they are areas where there is no presence of the State, of the National Police. They are areas where drugs and weapons are collected; So, they are easily very contestable, and it could be a scheme that the gangs need to control those spaces, and that is why there are violent deaths”, he maintained.
Violent deaths grew 92% in the first days of 2023 compared to the same period last year
He added that the State needs to manage a new national security system, which would implement education, mechanisms for youth programs within these spaces identified as problematic.
Nelson Yépez, a security affairs analyst, mentioned that a useful measure to contain criminal violence would be to strengthen a single intelligence unit with the “best men” from other similar units.
“That it continue to be supplied with information from all the intelligence units to be able to counteract everything; that none of these intelligence units have any type of interference; that they can work specifically doing the work they must do in these cases, trying to control the crime rate and lower violent deaths”, commented the specialist.
He is also in favor of executing a purge in all entities: Police, Armed Forces, Prosecutor’s Office and other judicial instances. (YO)
Source: Eluniverso
Mario Twitchell is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his insightful and thought-provoking writing on a wide range of topics including general and opinion. He currently works as a writer at 247 news agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
