17JUN24- Twelve hitmen would have entered Ecuador through the northern border with Colombia with the intention of assassinating President Daniel Noboa. The president said that the criminals clashed with the Ecuadorian security forces. The episode was related by Noboa to American journalist John Lee Anderson, who published an extensive report on the Ecuadorian president in The New Yorker magazine.

There are no dates or more precise data about the event. However, in the text the journalist refers to the fact that this conversation took place in Carondelet, when Noboa was newly elected president of Ecuador. That the event had happened a week before that interview, the president said (Noboa took office on November 23, 2023). According to the report, the president mentioned that the group of hitmen was intercepted while crossing the northern border; they apparently “had been sent by drug traffickers” in order to end the life of the head of state.

“Four of the alleged murderers had died in a shootout with Ecuadorian security forces. The rest were detained, but presumably there were others around. Now that he was president, he said with a sad laugh, he would never be out of danger again,” the New Yorker publication reported. It is the first time that the president has spoken specifically about a possible attack against him. On other occasions he has said in a general way, without delving into details, that he and his team are constantly threatened by his work.

Some topics are addressed in the American magazine report. Journalist John Lee Anderson accompanied Noboa for several weeks in different activities, spoke with him on different occasions and about different topics, including actions to stop murders and confront organized crime, the situation in prisons, his reaction to being compared to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele,

the opinion he has about some leaders in the region, as well as the police raid on the Mexican Embassy to arrest Jorge Glas. At one point, the president said he received intelligence that drug traffickers thought his government would “collapse in a couple of weeks.” “They never expected him to have the balls to declare war on them,” said Noboa in relation to the declaration of internal armed conflict.

He spoke about the increase in violence in Manta, a city that he compared to Sinaloa (Mexico), and how his presence in the Manabi capital pressured the security forces to contain the scale of homicides. Noboa even contemplated the ideas of building a prison in Antarctica -

because Ecuador has certain property there - or that threatened judges and prosecutors could judge and act from Ecuadorian embassies abroad, according to the report. The prison initiative was consulted by an official, who informed the president that there could be a way to establish the prison only if it was managed by the military.

Capturing Jorge Glas inside the Mexican Embassy in Quito was not a hasty or last-minute decision; President Daniel Noboa had that idea in mind for several months. This is what the Ecuadorian president revealed in The New Yorker article. Noboa said that the State Attorney General, Diana Salazar, through witnesses in the Metastasis case, had learned that the former vice president was supposedly conspiring against the government. “He is a very dark figure,” said the president.....-

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