Ecuador will close its borders with Colombia and Peru from this Saturday by elections

The president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboaordered Monday to close the land borders with Colombia and Peru from this Saturday to Monday, as an additional security measure for the celebration of the general elections, convened for this Sunday.

The Ecuadorian president, who appears to the re -election in these elections, announced at the same time the immediate militarization of the ports, the main exit door of the drug that arrives in Europe from Ecuador, and the reinforcement of the border lines with Colombia and Peru , the two countries with which it shares land border.

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“Given the destabilization attempts of armed groups, from Saturday 8 to Monday, February 10, the borders will remain closed,” Noboa said in a message posted through social networks. The closure will govern from a day before the elections and will last until one day after the vote.

Noboa took this measure as a caution against possible attacks of the criminal gangs he faced since the beginning of last year, when he declared the country under “internal armed conflict” against organized crime groups, mainly dedicated to drug trafficking, extortion and kidnappings , and those that his administration went to catalog as “terrorists.”

Last Saturday, Noboa himself had informed of the arrest of 12 people armed with rifles and equipped with police and military clothing that were allegedly arrested by their advanced security team in the coastal province of Manabí during an electoral tour of that area.

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“That the ‘narco -terrorist’ who want to cause destabilization. social.

From Colombia, most of the cocaine comes that Ecuador’s criminal gangs subsequently send to North America and Europe, both through boats that start from the Ecuadorian coast and through the ports, in containers with large amounts of drugs that are embarked under the facade of export procutos.

Meanwhile, the border with Peru has become in recent months an area of ​​activity of criminal gangs for the possibility of venturing illegal mining and receiving, according to several specialized reports of the Ecuadorian Observatory of Organized Crime (OECO), armament appropriate of the neighboring neighbor.

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The escalation of criminal violence that affects Ecuador led him to place in 2023 as the country with the highest homicide rate in Latin America, with an index of 47.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, eight times more than in 2016.

To cope with him, Noboa has issued a series of exception states where he has deployed the military to also fight against criminal gangs, including the militarization of prisons controlled by criminal structures, with a result of a 17 % decrease in the Homicides, although complaints of murders, extortion and kidnappings continue.