Ecuador

QUITO, Sept. 11 (Xinhua) -- Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso on Monday presented the country's army with 20 Turkish-made Cobra II armored vehicles to help fight organized crime.

"Today I am pleased to deliver these 20 Turkish-made Cobra II vehicles," Lasso said during the handover ceremony in the capital Quito, adding that 15 more units will arrive in October.

"This fleet will serve to defend our sovereignty and our security," he said.

GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (AP) — Men walk through a lush plantation between Ecuador ’s balmy Pacific coast and its majestic Andes, lopping hundreds of bunches of green bananas from groaning plants twice their height.

Workers haul the bunches to an assembly line, where the bananas are washed, weighed and plastered with stickers for European buyers. Owner Franklin Torres is monitoring all activity on a recent morning to make sure the fruit meets international beauty standards — and ever more important, is packed for shipment free of cocaine.

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — Ecuadorian authorities announced Friday the release of 50 guards and seven police officers who were taken hostage for more than a day, in what the government described as a response by criminal groups to its efforts to regain control of several large correctional facilities in the South American country.

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — Ecuador’s fragile security situation was underscored Thursday by a series of car bombings and the hostage-taking of more than 50 law enforcement officers inside various prisons, just weeks after the country was shaken by the assassination of a presidential candidate.

Ecuador’s National Police reported no injuries resulting from the four explosions in Quito, the capital, and in a province that borders Peru, while Interior Minister Juan Zapata said none of the law enforcement officers taken hostage in six different prisons had been injured.

GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (AP) — Ecuadorian voters looking for a new leader to help curb the country’s unprecedented violence will have to head to the polls again in October for a runoff that is likely to see the ally of a convicted former president vie against the principal heir of a banana growing and exporting empire.

GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (AP) — The unprecedented violence shaking Ecuador claimed the life of another political leader Monday, bringing the number of politics-related slayings within the last four weeks to three, including that of a presidential candidate.

The fatal shooting of Pedro Briones, a local leader of Revolución Ciudadana, the party of former President Rafael Correa, was confirmed by Luisa González, the frontrunner in Sunday’s special presidential election and member of the same party.

GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (AP) — Belen Diaz was walking home from college one evening when a motorcycle carrying two men made a menacing U-turn.

Terrified that she was about to be robbed for the eighth time in three years, the teaching student banged on a cab window until the driver drove her home. Diaz got away safe, but there was an unrelated fatal shooting the next day outside her gated community of two-story homes on the edge of the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil.

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — An Ecuadorian presidential candidate known for speaking up against cartels and corruption was shot and killed Wednesday at a political rally in the capital, amid a startling wave of gang-driven violence in the South American country.

President Guillermo Lasso confirmed the assassination of Fernando Villavicencio and suggested organized crime was behind his slaying, less than two weeks before the Aug. 20 presidential election.

QUITO, July 24 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The mayor of Ecuador’s third largest city was slain Sunday in a shooting that killed one other person and wounded four more, including two suspected attackers, officials said.

Agustín Intriago, a 38-year-old lawyer, belonged to the local Better City movement in the port city of Manta and was recently re-elected to a term that began in May.

QUITO, July 11 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Ten people were killed and ten injured, including children, in two shootings Sunday in Guayaquil, the Ecuadoran port city in the grips of a bloody war between drug trafficking gangs, officials said.

The shootings took place in two poor neighborhoods of the city that has seen at least three similar attacks since April.

The first shooting killed four people and injured 10 — including children aged 2, 13 and 14 — in Siete Lagos in the south of the city, the prosecutor’s office said on Monday.