OAS Secretary calls the car bomb explosion in Ecuador an “act of terrorism”

Guayaquil, Ecuador.- The Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Albert Ramdin, condemned this Friday the explosion of a car bomb that occurred on Tuesday in the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil and called it “an act of terrorism that has no place in the Americas”. “I condemn the car bomb attack in Guayaquil, an act of terrorism that has no place in the Americas. Attacks targeting civilians and public spaces are an affront to democracy, peace, and the rule of law,” Ramdin said on his X social media account. He added that the OAS and its mechanisms of the Inter-American Convention against Terrorism “stand in solidarity with the people of Ecuador in rejecting violence and intimidation by criminal groups.” On Tuesday night, a car exploded outside a major shopping center in Guayaquil and an office building belonging to the family of President Daniel Noboa, located in the city’s financial center, leaving one taxi driver dead and thirty people injured. According to initial investigations, those responsible for the act left from a neighborhood located in front of the Guayaquil penitentiary complex, where the largest and most dangerous prison in the country is located, as well as the maximum security prison.

You can read: Tense and emotional: how the meeting between Trump and Zelensky took place

In total, there were two vehicles containing explosives that were left at the scene, but only one exploded. The Minister of the Interior, John Reimberg, said that night that in the other vehicle they found four high-powered explosive charges with their respective safety fuses and an electronic device for activating the explosive. The area remained closed until this Friday, after the Police’s investigative units finished collecting evidence that may contribute to the case. The Government has indicated that Los Lobos, the largest criminal gang in Ecuador, would be behind the attack, in “retaliation” for the operations against illegal mining that the security forces are carrying out in the north of the country. Los Lobos is one of the criminal gangs that has been classified as “terrorist” within the framework of the “internal armed conflict” declared by Noboa to confront criminal groups, who are blamed for the escalation of violence that the Andean country has experienced in recent years, which has placed it at the head of the homicide index in Latin America. Furthermore, the criminal group was declared as “terrorist” by the Governments of the United States and Argentina.