Ecuador.- An Ecuadorian court sentenced the already imprisoned mayor of Guayaquil, Aquiles Alvarez, one of the main opponents of President Daniel Noboa, to three years in prison this Monday for the tampering and removal of an electronic ankle monitor that had been placed on him last year, as part of another judicial process.
The judges accepted the Prosecutor’s Office’s request, which hours earlier had asked for the maximum penalty to be imposed for the crime of failure to comply with legitimate decisions of a competent authority, which is punishable by prison sentences of between one and three years.
This is the first conviction received by the mayor of Ecuador’s most populous city, who is also being held for two other cases in the Cárcel del Encuentro, the maximum-security prison built on Noboa’s initiative to hold criminal leaders and which is inspired by the prison model implemented in El Salvador by President Nayib Bukele.
That prison is located in the coastal province of Santa Elena (southwest), so the mayor has been taken to a court in that locality to attend the hearings together with his lawyers.
The ruling is issued three months before the local authority elections, which will be on November 29th, and at the beginning of the candidate registration period.
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In addition, the judges imposed a fine equivalent to ten unified basic salaries ($4,820) and, as a comprehensive reparation measure, ordered that he offer a public apology through a nationwide media outlet.
In July of last year, a judge ordered Alvarez to wear an electronic ankle monitor as an alternative measure to pretrial detention in a case in which he is accused, along with 20 other people and companies, of an alleged illegal distribution and commercialization of fuels, known as ‘Triple A’.
However, the Prosecutor’s Office asserts that the mayor was not wearing the ankle monitor when he was arrested at his home on February 10, due to another investigation for alleged money laundering, known as ‘Goleada’, also related to his family fuel marketing business.
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According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the ankle monitor generated more than 2,000 alarms since it was placed, including 33 for “bracelet removed” and 1,515 for “offline”.
But Alvarez has pointed out that he never tampered with the ankle monitor and that the alerts were generated because his house is located in an area that is a “dead zone” and because he, in his duties as mayor, has traveled to places where the device generates automatic alerts, such as land terminals or airports.
Julio César Cueva, the mayor’s lawyer, told EFE that they will appeal the decision. Before the judges’ verdict was known, he had asserted that the Prosecutor’s Office had requested a maximum sentence even though it “did not present valid documentary evidence.”
“No witness claimed to have seen Aquiles Alvarez remove the ankle monitor” and that “his expert evidence arrived contaminated, poorly conducted, and in open contradiction with express procedural rules,” asserted Cueva.
Another prosecutor also requested last Sunday the maximum penalty for Alvarez in the ‘Triple A’ case, which could be six years and nine months in prison, according to his defense
