A suspected gang attack on a pool hall in Ecuador overnight left seven dead and four wounded, police said Saturday. It marked the second such attack in less than a month in the same city during a wave of violence in the country.
Videos posted on social media showed gunmen, most of them masked, opening fire as people played billiards in the city of Santo Domingo, about 100 miles west of Quito.
“Presumably this violent incident stems from a territorial dispute between organized crime groups and organized armed groups,” police Colonel Beatriz Benavides said.
Ecuador is a point of departure for cocaine shipments to the United States and Europe, and a hub for criminal groups involved in extortion and contract killings — some of them linked to cartels based in Mexico, Colombia or Albania.
The late Friday attack was the fourth of its kind in recent weeks. In August, seven people were killed in a pool hall in the same city. A similar pool hall massacre took place in July in the southwestern tourist city of General Villamil Playas, leaving at least nine dead.
In April, armed men killed 12 people at a cockfighting ring 18 miles from Santo Domingo.
Ecuador recorded more than 4,600 homicides in the first half of the year, a 47% increase from the same period of 2024, data from the Ecuadoran Observatory of Organized Crime shows.
Criminal gang violence continues unabated following the recapture in June of the country’s biggest drug lord, Adolfo MacĂas, alias Fito, after he escaped from a maximum-security prison in 2024.
In July, the Ecuadoran government extradited MacĂas to the United States, and he pleaded not guilty. A seven-count indictment charges MacĂas, who leads the gang Los Choneros, and an unidentified co-defendant with international cocaine distribution, conspiracy and weapons counts, including smuggling firearms from the U.S.
Last year, the U.S. classified Los Choneros as one of the most violent gangs and affirmed its connection to powerful Mexican drug cartels, which threaten Ecuador and the surrounding region
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