GUAYQUIL (Ecuador), Dec 1 (NNN-EFE) — Four women and two men were killed Sunday in a neighborhood in the Nueva Prosperina district of Guayaquil, one of the most violent areas of Ecuador, police confirmed.
Colonel Juan Carlos Soria, the police chief in charge of Zone 8, which includes Guayaquil and the neighboring municipalities of Durán and Samborondón, explained that men on two motorcycles arrived at the Flor de Bastión neighborhood in Nueva Prosperina, entered a house, and murdered five people.
Afterward, they killed a woman from a neighboring house who apparently went out into the street to say that there were children sleeping inside her home.
“In this case, they are collateral victims, which is regrettable. Unfortunately, the minimum codes that (criminal groups) have with respect to respecting women or the elderly could not be observed in these scenarios,” Soria said, confirming that none of the people killed had a criminal record.
One person survived this armed attack, and their testimony will be vital to advancing the investigations to clarify the motivations for the murders, the commander stated.
At the massacre site, police found seventeen pieces of ballistic evidence, six of which are from long guns and eleven from short guns.
The five people who died in the first house were reportedly celebrating the 81st birthday of a woman, who was said to be one of the victims, according to local media.
Nueva Prosperina is one of the most violent areas in Guayaquil and Ecuador. As of October, 533 murders were recorded in this location out of the 2,129 that were recorded throughout the city, according to figures from the Ministry of the Interior.
Ecuador has been living since 2024 under an “internal armed conflict” declared by President Daniel Noboa to intensify the fight against criminal gangs, which the government attributes to the unprecedented escalation that the Andean country has experienced in recent years, which in 2025 registers an average of one murder per hour. — NNN-EFE
