Ecuador Ends Two-Week Curfew With 1,200 Arrests and 707 Weapons Seized

The Ecuador curfew imposed by President Daniel Noboa as part of his intensifying war on organized crime ended Sunday night after two weeks of nightly lockdowns, mass arrests, and the largest domestic security deployment in the country’s recent history. The Rio Times, the Latin American financial news outlet, reports that Interior Minister John Reimberg confirmed the conclusion of operations across four coastal provinces, presenting results that the government framed as a success — and that rights organizations have called deeply troubling.

Between March 15 and 29, security forces operating under a nightly 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew in Guayas, El Oro, Los Ríos, and Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas arrested more than 1,200 people, captured 47 individuals classified as “military targets,” seized 707 firearms and bladed weapons, and retained or recovered 207 motorcycles and 107 vehicles.

The Scale of the Ecuador Curfew Operation

Noboa deployed 75,000 military and police personnel to the four provinces — all located along Ecuador’s Pacific coast, where drug trafficking corridors connect Colombian cocaine production zones to ports used for transshipment to the United States and Europe. The curfew banned all civilian movement during nighttime hours, including journalists, with only health, police, and military personnel authorized to circulate.

The operation followed a joint US-Ecuador strike in early March against a camp operated by Comandos de la Frontera, a FARC dissident group, along the Colombian border. US Southern Command provided intelligence, logistics, and special forces training, while the FBI opened its first office in Ecuador inside the US Embassy in Quito. Noboa met with US Southern Command chief Gen. Francis Donovan and Special Operations Rear Adm. Mark Schafer before launching the curfew.

The Human Rights Question

UN special rapporteurs publicly criticized Ecuador’s security legislation and executive decrees as not fully compatible with the country’s international human rights obligations. The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances raised concerns over repeated states of emergency, the prolonged use of armed forces in domestic policing, and allegations of abuses during operations.

The criticism carries particular weight given last year’s case in which eleven soldiers were sentenced to more than 30 years in prison for abducting four children whose bodies were found near a military base outside Guayaquil. Ecuador’s government has argued the emergency measures are temporary and that forces maintain a “zero tolerance” policy toward abuses — but the Bukele model of permanent emergency powers that Noboa appears to be emulating has drawn similar criticism in El Salvador.

A Deeper Problem

Ecuador recorded approximately 9,300 homicides in 2025 — a rate of roughly 50 per 100,000 residents and the highest in the country’s modern history. The violence is driven by rival cartels, primarily Los Choneros and Los Lobos, battling for control of cocaine transit routes. Since declaring an “internal armed conflict” in January 2024, Noboa has governed under successive states of exception with military-police joint patrols and warrantless home searches.

The two-week curfew produced numbers — 1,200 arrests, 707 weapons — but whether it meaningfully disrupted the cartels’ operational capacity remains an open question. Ecuador’s homicide rate rose from 5 to 50 per 100,000 between 2017 and 2025 despite escalating military interventions, suggesting the supply of violence is structural rather than tactical.

For Noboa, the political calculus is clear: security is what Latin American voters reward most. Whether the strategy produces lasting results or merely the appearance of control is the question that Ecuador — and the region — has yet to answer.