One gun, 34 dead: Inside Ecuador's war on black-market weapons
QUITO - The gun - a 9-milimeter pistol - blazed a violent trail even by the standards of one of Ecuador's most dangerous neighborhoods, the Nueva Prosperina precinct of Guayaquil.) casings from bullets fired by the weapon, recovered at the scenes of 27 separate violent incidents, were linked to 34 deaths, according to a police forensic unit. And a police forensic official told Reuters the authorities believe the pistol remains on the streets.
The weapon used in Nueva Prosperina may belong to, or have been rented out, among five rival drug gangs fighting for control of the precinct, Arguello said. The Pacific port city of Guayaquil is a hub for drug trafficking and the scene of turf wars between Mexican, Albanian and other foreign cartels that have led to a sharp rise in homicides.
Ecuador has just eight microscopes in a country of 17 million for bullet tracing, police said, and 247 trained technicians.In a small room in Quito's police forensic building, technician Jhony Tapia peered through the only ballistic microscope in the city at shell casings and bullets from five guns used to kill four people at a bar in the Amazon than a fingerprint," said Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Molina, head of the national police arms and explosives trafficking unit.
But after increased drug interdiction along Colombia's Pacific Coast, traffickers shifted their route to Ecuador and violent crime soared.Three run overland through Peru while a fourth route enters northern Ecuador near the border with Colombia, though police did not specify if the weapons came from there.
"There is no process of intelligence monitoring to locate the providers and systems and get ahead of the arms trafficking," said former army intelligence chief and security analyst Mario Pazmino.
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