Cristina Bazan |
Guayaquil (Ecuador) (EFE).- Streets closed with bars, surveillance cameras, alarms and private guards. This is the aspect that Guayaquil, in Ecuador, looks more and more every day, where many neighborhoods are closing themselves off and isolating themselves from the rest of the city, as if they were bunkers, to protect themselves from the onslaught of crime and crime.
In the metropolitan area of this port city, an average of seven people have been murdered per day at the end of the first quarter of 2023, almost double that in the same period of 2022, according to Police figures. Extortion and kidnappings are also growing at an alarming rate.
A level of violence never before seen in the country, which erupted after the pandemic and which the Police attribute to a power struggle between criminal organizations linked to drug trafficking.
“It is unfortunate that we have to lock ourselves up and that the criminals are outside, but it is the only step we had to take to feel safe,” Johana Torres, president of the Samanes 1 citadel, located in the north of the city, explained to EFE.
Six doors facing insecurity
In that neighborhood, where more than 300 families live, the residents placed six doors in December that prevent strangers from entering between 7:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. local time (between 12:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. GMT), a period in which they feel they have recovered community life, so they want the Municipality to allow them to close them 24 hours a day.
The installation of the doors, says Torres, was motivated by the 12 daily crime alerts that were reported last year. The bars placed on their houses were no longer enough to make their neighbors feel safe.
“For the Police we were in red and that was worrying. If they didn’t get into a house, they had robbed a person, they had beaten them, they stole cars. I was going through everything, ”she recalls.
Robberies, assaults, shootings
The residents of the Nueva Kennedy citadel live in a similar situation, who since June began to install gates on the pedestrian streets, with the aim of closing the entire neighborhood in the coming months.
“Since the beginning of last year we have had unsuccessful approaches with the Police. For this reason, the cases have been rising to the point of leaving us defenseless. We have thought of protecting ourselves with a comprehensive closure that does not affect the residents, but rather gives us back the ease of walking freely through the streets,” Francisco Torres, a neighborhood leader, told EFE.
Armed robberies, shootings and even extortion of businesses led the 600 residents to decide to install 17 doors throughout the sector.
According to figures from the Prosecutor’s Office, from January to June 1,603 cases of extortion were reported in Guayaquil, when in all of 2022 there were 1,265 and in 2021 they registered 425, and in robberies the first half of 2023 closed with 2,069 between houses and commercial premises, compared to 1,486 in all of 2022.
This situation is what has led the southern and northern neighborhoods of Guayaquil to close more and more streets in search of tranquility. “We want to be able to go out to a store to buy, to leave our clothes in the laundry, that is, things so everyday that we can no longer do,” says the leader of Nueva Kennedy.
A city in ‘bunkerisation’
Fernando Carrión, urban planner and security expert, affirms that what is happening in Guayaquil is also happening in other Latin American cities with high rates of violence. “These cities are in a process of bunkering, it is this logic of closing and turning into a bunker so that no one can enter,” he told EFE.
“How can you enter a place like this? First, with a passport, which is an identification; second, with a visa, because you have to ask a person for authorization to enter, and third, through customs, which is basically the search (review) that you undergo to enter. We are creating a set of borders within cities”, he reflects.
This measure, he says, “is a natural reaction to the inefficiency of the Government”, but it does not solve the problem of insecurity.
“What also happens with these neighborhoods is that the public space enters a privatization process that causes the city to disappear. And this is resolved with urban and citizen security policies, ”he adds.
no regulation
The Municipality of Guayaquil assured EFE that there is no ordinance that regulates the installation of doors in the streets, so they do not have a registry and blamed the previous administrations for not taking action on the matter.
In parallel, it has announced the creation of a cantonal security plan, for which “citizen experiences” on this issue will be collected.
After two violent weekends with more than ten murders, Mayor Aquiles Alvarez and Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso met on July 11 and announced the arrival of more police officers to target southern Guayaquil, “the central focus of crime” in the country.