7 killed in another mass shooting in Ecuador Bool Hall while the police blame

An alleged gang attack in a pool hall in Ecuador during the night left seven dead and four injured, police said Saturday. He marked the second attack of this type in less than a month in the same city during a wave of violence in the country.

The videos published on social networks showed armed men, most of them masked, opening fire while people played billiards in the city of Santo Domingo, about 100 miles west of Quito.

“Presumably, this violent incident comes from a territorial dispute between organized crimes groups and organized armed groups,” said police colonel Beatriz Benavides.

Ecuador is a starting point for cocaine shipments to the United States and Europe, and a center of criminal groups involved in extortion and contract murders, some of them linked to posters based in Mexico, Colombia or Albania.

Friday’s attack was last the fourth of its kind in recent weeks. In August, Seven people were killed in a pool room in the same city. TO massacre similar to pool hall It took place in July in the tourist city of the southwest of General Villamil Playas, leaving at least nine dead.

In April, armed men killed 12 people In a ring of rooster fights 18 miles from Santo Domingo.

Ecuador registered more than 4,600 homicides in the first half of the year, an increase of 47% since the same period of 2024, as shown by the Ecuadore Organized Crime Observatory data.

The violence of the criminal gangs continues incessantly after the recovery in June of the country’s largest drug trafficker, Adolfo Macíasaka Fito, after he escaped from a maximum security prison in 2024.

In July, the Ecuadorian Government extradited Macías to the United States and he He declared himself innocent. An accusation of seven charges accuses Macías, who leads the Los Choneros gang, and an unidentified coacusado with the international distribution of cocaine, conspiracy and weapons, including the smuggling of firearms in the United States.

Last year, the United States classified the Choneros as one of the most violent gangs and affirmed their connection with powerful Mexican drug cartelsthat threaten Ecuador and the surrounding region

• Ecuador