{"id":57539,"date":"2026-07-28T11:09:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T11:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/ecuador-confronting-gang-members-at-the-heart-of-a-drug-battle\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T11:09:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T11:09:10","slug":"ecuador-confronting-gang-members-at-the-heart-of-a-drug-battle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/ecuador-confronting-gang-members-at-the-heart-of-a-drug-battle\/","title":{"rendered":"Ecuador: Confronting gang members at the heart of a drug battle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The BBC&#8217;s Orla Guerin goes on patrol with Ecuador&#8217;s police, who are grappling with a huge surge in drug crime.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Drugs have been pouring into Ecuador from neighbouring Colombia and Peru &#8211; the two biggest producers in the world. Powerful home-grown gangs, with links to Mexican cartels and Albanian mafia groups, are then helping to smuggle the cocaine onwards. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Last year, Ecuador&#8217;s murder rate was one of the highest in the world, with more than 9,200 people killed, according to the country&#8217;s interior ministry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/videos\/c1l1d429m8eo?at_medium=RSS&#038;at_campaign=rss\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The BBC&#8217;s Orla Guerin goes on patrol with Ecuador&#8217;s police, who are grappling with a huge surge in drug crime. Drugs have been pouring into Ecuador from neighbouring Colombia and Peru &#8211; the two biggest producers in the world. Powerful home-grown gangs, with links to Mexican cartels and Albanian mafia groups, are then helping to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latin-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57541,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57539\/revisions\/57541"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}