300,000 People Flee Gang Violence in Ecuador, but the Crisis Is Not Recognized

More than 300,000 people in Ecuador have left their homes over the past three years because of gang violence, according to the UN Refugee Agency and the Ombudsman's Office. In Guayaquil, a 66-year-old woman left after bullets hit the roofs of her neighbourhood. She had lived there for almost 20 years. She was afraid of the Los Tiguerones gang. She feared her daughter could be killed riding a motorcycle to work, or that the gang could force her teenage grandson to join.

Fighting between two parts of the Los Tiguerones gang killed 22 people in Nueva Prosperina, a district of Guayaquil, last year. The gang also uses extortion, which means it demands money from families and threatens them if they do not pay. Local police estimate that half of the families there have faced extortion. A 49-year-old woman in the same district said gangs set the rules. "We are free inside our homes, but outside we are prisoners," she said.

Ecuador was once considered safe in Latin America. Now only Haiti and Colombia have more people who have left their homes because of violence in the region. Last year the country had 9,216 violent deaths. That is a rate of 51 per 100,000 people, about eight times higher than ten years ago.

But the government says it does not know which agency should help people who must leave their homes because of violence. Billy Navarrete, head of the Guayaquil human rights committee, says the law does not recognize this kind of displacement, when people must leave their homes because of violence. Because of that, victims are not protected, and no system exists to find or help them. That makes the crisis harder to solve.