A sign on the doorway said “For rent” and the house’s lights were out. But the assault team were convinced a group of armed gang members lurked inside and they were determined to smoke them out. As darkness enveloped Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, six truckloads of military and police troopers screeched to a halt in front of the seemingly vacant home.
Some pummelled its front and side entrances with steel battering rams, crowbars and fists. Others scrambled up its outer wall.
Soon their hunch was confirmed. One suspect leapt from a second-floor window and ran across a corrugated roof. As the security forces finally stormed the house, a second man was wrestled to the ground inside a bedroom.
A third suspect was bundled to the living-room floor as the masked squad demolished the house’s interior in search of hidden guns and drugs. “Where’s the rifle?” one soldier bellowed as a half-naked prisoner was thrashed with a pole, leaving red streaks across his back.
Minutes later, the weapon was found stashed inside a child’s ransacked bedroom, along with a pistol and another US-made Mac-10 submachine gun. The girl sat at the kitchen table with her mother, fiddling anxiously with a toy.
The disturbing scenes unfolded in January, just a few hours after Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, vowed to wage an unflinching “war” to prevent Ecuador becoming “a narco-state”. The two captured men were allegedly members of Los Águilas (the Eagles), one of 22 gangs and organised crime groups that Noboa accuses of bringing carnage to what was until recently one of South America’s most peaceful countries.
The raid was an unmistakably Latin American spectacle: the kind of scene that has played out in recent years from Tijuana, on the Mexican-US border, to Rio de Janeiro as part of a bloody and largely ineffectual battle against the illegal drug trade. But it was also a scene umbilically linked to European cities thousands of miles away, where soaring demand for cocaine from South America has helped make cities such as Guayaquil some of the most violent on Earth.