Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia
“Just weeks before Ecuador descended into chaos, with prison riots, two escaped criminal kingpins and the brief siege of a television station, the country’s top prosecutor launched a major operation aimed at rooting out narco-corruption at the highest levels of government.
The investigation, called “Caso Metastasis,” led to raids across Ecuador and more than 30 arrests.
Among those charged were judges accused of granting gang leaders favorable rulings, police officials who were said to have altered evidence and delivered weapons to prisons, and the former director of the prison authority himself, who was accused of giving special treatment to a powerful drug trafficker.
They had been implicated by text chats and call logs retrieved from cellphones belonging to the drug trafficker, who was murdered while imprisoned.
When the attorney general, Diana Salazar, announced the charges last month, she said the investigation had revealed the spread of criminal groups through Ecuador’s institutions. She also warned of a possible “escalation in violence” in the days to come, and said that the executive branch had been put on alert.”
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