ANALYSIS
Ecuador, war by decree: calling crime a war to change the rules
4 October 2026 — Ecuador
In brief
- In 2025 Ecuador had the highest homicide rate in Latin America: 50.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, a record. The violence of the gangs linked to drug trafficking is real, and the state has a duty to protect its citizens.
- President Daniel Noboa responds by calling it war. Since January 2024 he has claimed that an "internal armed conflict" is under way in the country. The Constitutional Court has rejected this justification five times, because the government has not proved it.
- On 18 June 2026 decree 424 reasserted it by another route, one that escapes the Court's automatic review. The decree opens the door to foreign troops with immunity and allows the president to pardon soldiers and police officers who act against the armed groups, without excluding any offence. It also asks Parliament for an amnesty.
- Meanwhile the Prosecutor's Office is investigating 43 possible enforced disappearances committed by security forces since 2023. For one of them, four boys from Guayaquil found dead in 2024, 16 soldiers have been convicted.
- The two international sources on conflict deaths give wildly different numbers: 4,070 in 2025 according to ACLED, 353 according to UCDP. The gap is the same legal question this piece asks: war or crime?
In January 2024 an armed group burst into a television studio in Guayaquil live on air, while riots broke out in the prisons and a gang boss escaped. The country, until a few years earlier among the calmest in the region, had become a hub for cocaine bound for Europe and the United States, with local gangs allied to the Mexican Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels and to Albanian trafficking networks (InSight Crime). President Noboa, then 36, responded with the army on the streets and with one word: war. This piece does not ask whether the violence in Ecuador is serious: it is. It asks what changes when a state calls it war, and who gains from it.
The facts
On 9 January 2024 decree 111 recognised for the first time the existence of an "internal armed conflict" and designated dozens of criminal groups as "terrorist". In the following months the government used this justification to declare a state of exception several times. The Constitutional Court, which in Ecuador must review every state of exception, approved the measures on grounds of "serious internal unrest", but rejected the armed-conflict justification every time. On the fifth occasion, it rebuked the president for invoking it again without proving it (Primicias).
On 18 June 2026 Noboa signed decree 424 (El Universo). The decree does not declare a state of exception, but "recognises" the conflict as a legal fact in its own right. The difference is technical and decisive: a state of exception must go through the Court, a decree of this kind does not. Challenging it requires an ordinary legal action, which a citizen filed at the end of June (Primicias). The decree:
- deploys 13,000 soldiers in four provinces, Guayas, Manabí, El Oro and Los Ríos (France 24);
- authorises the presence of troops from allied countries, with the immunity provided for in the agreements signed by Ecuador, a few days after a meeting between Noboa and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon (Infobae);
- allows the president to grant pardons, reductions or commutations of sentences to soldiers, police officers and civilians who acted against the armed groups, and asks the National Assembly for an amnesty. The decree lists no excluded offences (El Comercio).
On 16 November 2025, 60.8% of Ecuadorians had rejected in a referendum the proposal to remove the constitutional ban on foreign military bases in the country (article 5 of the Constitution) (Primicias). In August 2026 the Assembly passed a law allowing the army to support the police against organised crime even without a state of exception, for periods of up to 180 days, renewable (BioBioChile).
What happened in the meantime
The disappearances. According to the Attorney General's Office, since 2023 at least 43 people are possible victims of enforced disappearance by security forces. Amnesty International has verified 10 of them, six of which involve minors, all during military operations in 2024 in the coastal provinces (Amnesty, submission to the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances). Amnesty also points to the obstacles to the investigations: very few dedicated prosecutors and armed forces that classify information as a state secret.
Las Malvinas. On 8 December 2024 four boys aged between 11 and 15 were stopped by a military patrol in the Las Malvinas neighbourhood of Guayaquil. Their bodies were found on 24 December, with signs of violence. On 22 December 2025 a court convicted 16 soldiers of enforced disappearance: 11 to 34 years and eight months in prison, five to 30 months for having cooperated with the investigation (France 24). The UN Human Rights Office called it an important step against impunity. Six months later, decree 424 provided for pardons for the military without excluding enforced disappearance.
The joint operations. In July 2026 Human Rights Watch published an investigation based on 62 interviews, satellite images and documents (HRW). Between 1 and 6 March 2026, in the community of San Martín, on the border with Colombia, four workers at a dairy company were allegedly tortured with electric shocks during a joint operation between Ecuador and the United States; none of them has been charged with any offence. Between January and March some fishing boats were hit by drones at sea; one, the Fiorella, is missing with eight people on board. Survivors describe soldiers who spoke English. The US Department of Defense and the Coast Guard deny any responsibility; according to HRW it is likely that US authorities were involved or informed. Neither the Ecuadorian nor the US government answered the organisation's questions.
The numbers that don't add up
On our conflict map Ecuador shows the widest gap between the two sources we use.
| Source | What it counts | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| ACLED | all recorded political violence, including armed gangs | 4,070 dead |
| UCDP | only deaths in organised armed conflicts, above a minimum threshold | 353 dead |
| InSight Crime | all homicides | 50.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest rate in Latin America |
Sources: ACLED, data as of 25/9/2026; UCDP via Our World in Data; InSight Crime, March 2026.
None of the three sources is wrong. They count different things. UCDP, which applies a criterion close to that of the law of armed conflict, finds very few deaths in Ecuador attributable to a war. ACLED, which counts all political violence, finds more than ten times as many. And homicides as a whole are many more still. The question "war or crime?" is not philosophical: it decides which rules apply to those who shoot.
Legal analysis
1. A war is not declared: it is established. Under international humanitarian law a non-international armed conflict exists when two conditions are met together: armed groups with sufficient organisation, and clashes of a certain intensity. This is the test set by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Tadić case (1995) and followed ever since. A decree is not enough. An analysis published in the journal of the International Committee of the Red Cross concludes that the Ecuadorian government has proved neither: it described the groups as a bloc, without proving the organisation of each one, and presented the attacks as isolated incidents (International Review of the Red Cross, n. 926). It is the same conclusion as the Constitutional Court's.
2. Why the word matters. In war an enemy combatant can be killed for what he is, even if at that moment he threatens no one. In peacetime the police, and soldiers when they act as police, may use lethal force only as a last resort, to protect a life in immediate danger (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 6; UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force, 1990). Calling the fight against gangs a war means moving the boundary of what is lawful. And the right to life also works the other way: as we wrote about Nigeria, the state has a duty to protect its citizens from gangs. The problem is not that the state acts. It is by which rules.
3. Disappearances cannot be pardoned. Ecuador is a party to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and to the Inter-American Convention on the same subject. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, since the Barrios Altos v. Peru judgment (2001), has held that amnesties and other measures that prevent the prosecution and punishment of serious violations such as enforced disappearance and torture are incompatible with the American Convention. Ecuador's own Constitution, in article 80, declares genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and enforced disappearance not subject to statutes of limitation, and establishes that none of these cases may be amnestied (text at INREDH). A power of pardon or an amnesty without exclusions, in a country with 43 possible disappearances under investigation and 16 soldiers already convicted, is exactly the instrument this case law prohibits.
4. Foreign soldiers and accountability. Hosting the troops of an allied country is not prohibited by international law, and status of forces agreements often provide that foreign soldiers are tried by their own country. But immunity does not erase obligations. If a foreign soldier commits a violation on Ecuadorian territory, Ecuador remains obliged to ensure that someone investigates. And the United States, if it takes part in the operations, is bound by the same rules on the use of force. For the boats hit at sea documented by HRW, today there is no one who answers.
The symmetry test
The same questions, turned around.
Noboa is an ally of the United States. If a government hostile to Washington, for example Venezuela's, declared the fight against gangs an "armed conflict", called dozens of groups terrorists, made boys disappear at checkpoints and promised pardons to its soldiers, how would we report it? The standard must be the same.
And it applies to Washington. Since September 2025 the United States has been striking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific with the same logic: labelling traffickers "narco-terrorists" in order to treat them as enemies at war instead of as suspects to be put on trial. We wrote about it in the manifesto on the United States. The method is the same, and we judge it the same way.
Finally, there is a mirror. Russia called a war a "special military operation", so as not to call it a war. Ecuador calls a criminal emergency a war, so as to be able to call it that. In both cases the word is chosen to change the rules that apply. The law should not depend on the name a government gives to the facts.
Editorial judgment
This section expresses the site's position. It is separate from the facts set out above.
Ecuador has a real and dramatic problem, and those who live there have the right to demand security. We are not writing this piece to deny it. We are writing it because the response chosen by the government shifts the problem from gang violence to the rules of the state.
A war declared by decree, removed from judicial review, with immune foreign soldiers and the promise of pardon for those who fight, is not a strategy against crime. It is a set of exceptions that add up, and that make it harder to know who did what. The four boys of Las Malvinas were killed by soldiers acting within the framework of the first declaration of war. The trial that followed is one of the few proofs that the rule of law still works in Ecuador. Decree 424, as it is written, could erase it.
There is also a lesson that goes beyond Ecuador. The "war on the cartels" model is spreading across the region, with Washington's backing, and it carries the same idea with it: that a dangerous enough enemy justifies suspending the rules. It is an old idea, and the history of Latin America knows well how it ends. When a government can decide on its own who is at war with it, next time the list could grow longer.
What to watch
- The Constitutional Court's decision on the challenge to decree 424.
- Any amnesty bill in the Assembly and the first presidential pardons, in particular if they concern those convicted in the Las Malvinas case.
- The conclusions of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances after its review of Ecuador.
- The arrival of foreign troops and the text of the agreements on their immunity.
- Answers, if they come, on the fate of the Fiorella's crew.
Related pieces: Nigeria: who is killed, who tells the story, who should prosecute · For the Non-Recognition of the Conduct of the United States of America
Sources: Primicias (Constitutional Court) · El Universo (decree 424, 6/2026) · Primicias (challenge, 6/2026) · France 24 (19/6/2026) · Infobae (19/6/2026) · El Comercio (6/2026) · Primicias (referendum, 12/2025) · BioBioChile (25/8/2026) · Amnesty International (3/2026) · France 24 (22/12/2025) · Human Rights Watch (21/7/2026) · InSight Crime (3/2026) · InSight Crime (Ecuador profile) · International Review of the Red Cross, n. 926 · INREDH (Constitution, art. 80)
Verification note: the 2025 death tolls come from ACLED (data as of 25/9/2026) and UCDP (via Our World in Data), the same sources as our map; the homicide rate from InSight Crime. The allegations about the joint operations are Human Rights Watch's: the US Department of Defense and Coast Guard deny any responsibility. Situation as of 4 October 2026.