Political upheaval and street protests, gun battles and floods. José Luis Calderón has seen it all during his 23 years as one of Guayaquil’s top television journalists. Never had the Ecuadorean reporter been the story himself.
That changed just after lunch last Tuesday when the 47-year-old reporter heard shouts and the sound of people running in the corridors of TC Televisión, the channel where he works. “At first … we thought it was a fight,” he remembered. But as the yelling intensified, it became clear it was not.
Calderón had been in the newsroom next to the channel’s studio when the pandemonium began. Sensing something was badly wrong, he bolted into the bathroom with two female workmates and called his brother-in-law. “I just told him: ‘I don’t know what’s happening …… but we’re in an emergency situation. Please call 911. I’m trapped. I’m hiding … My colleagues are in pieces.’”
Next door, more than a dozen masked gang members carrying explosives and guns had stormed the channel’s studio as its cameras rolled, broadcasting the attack to the nation – and soon the world. Moments later they barged into the bathroom and ordered Calderón and his colleagues out.
“They were kids – kids with guns. Disorganized. Impetuous. They seemed happy. They seemed proud of what they were doing – but I don’t think it was pride,” Calderón said. “It was as if they were playing a game – only with extremely dangerous and lethal weapons.”
Calderón clasped his hands together as if in prayer as one of those weapons was placed to his throat. A mobile phone was produced and the journalist ordered to send a message to the outside world. “Tell them,” snapped one of the hoodlums, “that if the police come in, we will kill you.”
“Nothing like this has every happened before. I just can’t explain this,” the shell-shocked journalist said the next day during an interview at his home. “All I can do is give thanks that we are alive.”
The television station assault was the crescendo of a week of bloodshed and mayhem that has confounded a country long regarded as one of South America’s safest places. Elsewhere in Ecuador, scores of prison guards were taken hostage, buildings and vehicles were torched, car bombs detonated, and at least 16 people killed.
“Ecuador was always considered an island of peace. Ecuador was always considered a land of tranquility,” Lt Marcelo Gutiérrez, a spokesperson for the country’s navy, said on Thursday as thousands of troops were deployed to restore order after the seemingly coordinated wave of attacks.
No more. Over the past four years – as Mexican cartels and crime syndicates including the Albanian mafia have flocked to Ecuador in search of huge profits from the cocaine trade – its murder rate has soared, making Ecuador one of Latin America’s most violent nations. Each day its tabloid newspapers fill with bloodcurdling tales of beheadings, butchery and bombs.
“European drug use is the fundamental pillar of violence in Ecuador,” said organized crime expert Chris Dalby, explaining how Guayaquil’s Pacific coast port was the main point of export for cocaine from neighbouring Colombia and Peru, the world’s biggest producers.
“The number one transatlantic cocaine trafficking route is Guayaquil to Antwerp … [although] you’re now beginning to see Ecuadorean cocaine showing up in smaller ports – Le Havre in France, Lisbon, Gioia Tauro in Italy, Portsmouth in England, Gothenburg in Sweden. It’s turning up everywhere,” added Dalby, who runs the investigative journalism outlet World of Crime. “The unending demand for cocaine in Europe is what is fuelling the Ecuadorian drug war.”
Ecuador’s rapidly intensifying crisis caught the world’s attention last August when presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated on the campaign trail after pledging to crack down on corruption and drug trafficking. That crime was blamed on Los Lobos (The Wolves), one of more than 20 organized crime groups squabbling for control of Ecuador’s drug trade – and one of the groups on which the election’s eventual winner, Daniel Noboa, this week declared his government at war.
“We will never give in to evil – and we will fight tirelessly always,” the 36-year-old proclaimed after declaring Ecuador in a state of “internal armed conflict” following Tuesday’s raid on TC Televisión.
Since then, more than 22,000 troops have reportedly been ordered on to the streets to hunt and “neutralize” the gangs.
As night fell on Thursday, a heavily armed squad of air force special forces and police operatives raced through Guayaquil’s eerily quiet streets in pickup trucks – one of the opening chapters in Noboa’s nascent anti-gang crusade.
Their first objective was Las Orquídeas, a working-class district near the high-security prison where this week’s violence began after a notorious gang boss known as Fito mysteriously vanished from his cell.
Troops fanned out along one residential street, and a black-clad police agent produced a metal battering ram, smashing his way into a single-story home. Fluorescent green laser sights danced along walls and roofs, as other troopers scrambled on to buildings and scanned the shadows for hidden threats.
In a plaza filled with seesaws, climbing frames and swings, two half-naked men lay face down on the curb at the feet of a cluster of air force troopers with rifles. One suspect was Colombian, the other Venezuelan. “They have suspicious tattoos,” one serviceman said as the pair were interrogated. Ten minutes later, screams of agony and distress could be heard from 200 metres away as the men were pumped for information with sticks, rifle barrels and tactical boots.
But despite such operations, the daily slaughter has continued like clockwork. That afternoon, an assassin entered a nearby barbershop and opened fire in broad daylight, killing a customer and injuring a stylist, before fleeing.
Police sealed off the area with yellow crime scene tape, body collectors arrived, and within minutes of the murder the salon’s owners were sweeping the victim’s blood and hair into the gutter and hosing down its scarlet-stained porch. The victim’s shattered mother sunk her face into another woman’s bosom and wept. “I thought it was a lie,” she cried. “They must have confused him with someone else,” the woman replied.
Calderón knew he was lucky to have avoided the same fate. The journalist was freed after police special forces managed to retake the TV station’s studios, capturing 13 gunmen.
One hostage was injured by a ricocheting bullet but otherwise Calderón’s colleagues emerged physically unscathed.
The jazz-loving reporter headed home, through empty streets, to a flat decorated with posters of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. There, he put on some music and poured himself a large glass of single malt whisky.
“This used to be such a calm place. It was completely different. Just tranquility,” Calderón lamented as he reminisced about his childhood in another Guayaquil.
What did Ecuador’s future look like now? “Uncertain,” Calderón answered. “Utterly uncertain.”
