Ecuador's President, Daniel Noboa, decreed a new 60-day state of emergency this Thursday to combat organized crime, affecting nine of the country's 24 provinces, as well as four municipalities in three other provinces. Among the jurisdictions affected by the new state of emergency are the capital, Quito, and Guayaquil, the country's two largest cities, which together have a population of about 7 million out of a total of nearly 18 million in the Andean nation. During this state of emergency, fundamental rights to the inviolability of the home and correspondence will be suspended, allowing the Police and Armed Forces to enter homes without prior judicial authorization and to intercept communications. Additionally, the Armed Forces will deploy to conduct operations against criminal organizations in coordination with the police. The decree was issued on the eve of the three-day Easter holiday in Ecuador, when millions of Ecuadorians are traveling to visit other parts of the country. The provinces under this measure are mainly located on the country's coast, where criminal organizations are concentrated, primarily engaged in drug trafficking with the aim of sending large quantities of cocaine, mainly produced in Colombia, to Europe and the United States. This is the case of Esmeraldas and El Oro, bordering Colombia and Peru respectively, as well as Guayas, Manabí, Santa Elena, Los Ríos, and Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas. To these are added Pichincha, where Quito is located, and the Amazonian province of Sucumbíos, also bordering Colombia, where recently the Ecuadorian Armed Forces conducted military operations with the collaboration of the United States to allegedly destroy camps of the Comandos de la Frontera, a dissident group of the extinct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Since 2024, when Noboa declared 'war' on organized crime, the Ecuadorian president has decreed successive states of emergency whose scope has varied depending on the moment, at times covering the entire national territory. The second-to-last one even included a 15-day curfew in four provinces, including Guayas, whose capital is Guayaquil. The purpose is to quell the country's worst criminal violence crisis, but so far, violence rates have continued to rise, making Ecuador a leader in Latin America in homicides, with more than 50 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2025.
