At least five people died and another eight were injured this Sunday when three men opened fire inside a house in Guayaquil, one of the cities hardest hit by crime and drug trafficking in Ecuador, police reported.
“So far we have five people dead and eight people injured, who are in different health centers in the city,” police colonel Fabary Montalvo told the press.
One of the deceased, Montalvo explained, is a police officer who received several bullet wounds to the head.
The colonel pointed out that, according to witnesses, three men aboard a motorcycle reached the Isla Trinitaria sector, in the south of Guayaquil, got out of the vehicle and entered the home, where “they made several detonations with a firearm.”
Guayaquil, a city mired in the violence of drug gangs, has become the scene of massacres.
Last April, another shooting left a dozen dead and three injured. And in the neighboring city of Durán this week a prosecutor handling homicide cases was murdered.
The murder rate has almost doubled in a year, from 14 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2021 to 25 in 2022, according to authorities.
Ecuador has become a strategic point for the transport of drugs to the United States and Europe.
The country, located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s largest cocaine producers, has suffered an increase in criminal violence and drug trafficking since last year.
In 2022 the authorities seized more than 200 tons of drugs, most of them cocaine.