Ecuadorian families flee homes amid soaring gang violence

For one grandmother, it was when bullets began hitting the rooftops of her neighbourhood that she decided she would have to leave the housing development where she had lived for nearly 20 years.

A sharp rise in fighting between gang factions in Ecuador has prompted thousands of families to flee and abandon their homes to the gangs, who strip the houses for drug money or use them to hide kidnapping victims, according to residents and police.

One of the areas that has been the site of the heaviest bloodshed is the Nueva Prosperina district in the coastal city of Guayaquil, where fighting between factions of the Los Tiguerones gang last year killed 22 people. Among those who fled was a 66-year-old woman, who, like other residents of the district Reuters spoke to for this story, asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals from the gangs.

Armed groups were targeting people indiscriminately, assuming that anyone entering the neighbourhood belonged to a different gang, she said. She worried that if she had stayed, her daughter, who commutes to work on a motorcycle, could be killed or her teenage grandson recruited.

“It was a terrible situation. Bullets were hitting the rooftops and that made me leave,” she said.

The woman and her family are among more than 300,000 people in Ecuador who have left their homes over the past three years because of violence, including death threats, extortion, recruitment by criminal groups or the murder of relatives, according to the UN Refugee Agency and the Ombudsman’s Office, though advocates say the true figure could be higher.