Ecuador TV station attack saw victims 'hunted down' in 'extremely violent' siege

11 January 2024 , 14:21

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Alina Manrique speaking about the attack on the television set (Image: BBC)

A journalist has told how she feared “I wouldn’t see my children again” after armed masked men broke onto the set of an Ecuadorian TV channel.

The men carrying guns and what looked like sticks of dynamite entered the set of the TC Television network in Guayaquil during a news programme that was airing live in thousands of homes across the nation. They shouted that they had bombs and gunshots could be heard.

It followed the breakout of Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias Fito, head of the Choneros cartel, from a high security prison last Sunday and President Daniel Noboa called a state of emergency for 60 days where civil liberties were removed and the army was allowed to enter prisons to restore control.

There have since been car bombs, police kidnapped in the street and threats made to the government by the cartels, while a gang believed to be part of the Tiguerones cartel entered the building where TC Television is based.

People were forced to lie on the ground in the building (Ecuador´s National Police/AFP vi)

“I thought it was my last day on Earth and I wouldn’t see my children again,” said Alina Manrique, head of news at the station. “They hunted us, they looked for us everywhere and they took us to the set with the intention, the clear intention to me, that all the world saw what they dared to do at 2pm - they dared to take over a TV station and to kneel 50 journalists, a city and a country.”

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Staff were shoved to the ground at gunpoint and made to plead to the president on a video that he doesn’t intervene against the criminal gangs. "It was an extremely violent attack," said journalist Jorge Rendon in a BBC video. No one was killed in the siege, and authorities later said that all the masked intruders had been arrested, 13 in all, and would be charged with terrorism.

But terror still reigns on the streets of Ecuador with explosions, shootings, vehicles blown up and prisons out of control. So far Guayaquil Mayor Aquiles Alvarez has said that there are at least eight dead from the violence in the city. President Noboa said that there was “a terrorist threat against the pillars of the sovereign state” around an hour after gunmen entered the television station in Guayaquil.

People are helped to safety during the siege (AFP via Getty Images)

But the authorities show no signs of capturing Fito and another rival gang boss, Fabricio Colon Pico, AKA The Savage, also escaped along with 38 other prisoners from a jail in Riobamba, south of the capital Quito. He is a leader of the Lobos cartel that is seen as the most violent in the country. He was detained on January 5 of this year having been accused of kidnap and also planning to kill state prosecutor Diana Salazar.

Before he escaped from prison, he recorded a video message from his prison cell saying that Ms Salazar and the president would be responsible for killing him if they moved him, as was the intention, to another prison La Roca, due to rival gangs. Pressure is growing on the president with last year seeing a new record high of murders at 7,600 deaths.

Tim Hanlon