MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

State of exception decreed in Ecuador for yet another 30 days

The extension comes a few days after last weekends’ massacre at the Guayaquil Litoral Penitentiary

The Government of Ecuador has renewed the state of exception for an additional 30 days. The measure had first been adopted Oct. 18 due to a security crisis.

By executive decree 257, President Guillermo Lasso renewed the state of exception declared on October 18 (...) for a period of 30 more days,” the Government's Communications Secretariat said in a statement.

The measure will apply to 9 provinces, including El Oro, Guayas (Guayaquil), Santa Elena, Manabí, Esmeraldas and Pichincha (Quito).

The Oct. 18. decree had imposed the measure for 60 days, but Ecuador's Constitutional Court eventually lowered it down to 30 days on the alleged grounds that the initial duration had “not been justified,” due to which the “scope of the aforementioned decree and the mobilization measure of the Armed Forces, will be limited to 30 days from its issuance.”

The Government claims the state of exception is “to protect the rights of the people in Ecuador, as well as to control the circumstances of insecurity that have been generated, to restore peaceful coexistence and public order.”

The state of exception allows the deployment of the armed forces for missions of citizen security and against crime in the nine provinces included in the decree, to carry out operations of “control, searches and requisition” in cases of possession of weapons, and substances subject to control.

The extension comes a few days after last weenkend's massacre at the Guayaquil Litoral Penitentiary, in which 68 inmates have died in gang-related violence. There have been seven other prison riots this year, with hundred of inmates killed.

According to the authorities, what is happening in the prisons is a reflection of a struggle in the streets for the control of drug trafficking, between gangs linked to inte