La Jornada – Diana Salazar, the ironclad prosecutor against “narcopolitics” in Ecuador

Quito. She’s no fortune teller, but Attorney General Diana Salazar anticipated Ecuador’s worst drug bust weeks before. “Let the country be ready,” he announced after removing the most vulnerable strands of the mafia and their tentacles on power.

“The response to this operation will definitely increase the violence,” the 42-year-old woman continued without hesitation on December 14.

He had just announced an investigation into the metastasis, described as the cornerstone of “narcopolitics” in Ecuador: “There is a deep structural disintegration in the country which (…) is a system eaten away by the cancer of corruption,” he added.

Judges, politicians, prosecutors, police officers, former directors of the Prison Authority and many other members of high-level power were accused of benefiting criminal organizations in exchange for money, gold, prostitutes, apartments and luxuries.

With an iron fist, the first black woman to reach the head of the prosecutor’s office uncovered the plot after examining thousands of chats and call logs from the phone of a terrified boss killed in a prison riot in October 2022.

Since then, in the few public appearances she wears a bulletproof vest and is protected by a strong security plan: “I call him by first and last name (…), now come and kill me,” she said defiantly during the hearing. , when she asked for the incarceration of eight new suspects.

On January 7, Salazar’s prediction came true. Over the course of a week, drug traffickers have taken hundreds of hostages to the Ecuadorian state in prisons, attacks with explosives, armed attacks on the press and shootings, killing up to twenty in a wave of violence.

Just when the situation seemed under control, anti-mafia prosecutor Cesar Suárez, who was investigating a spectacular takeover by armed men on the TC television channel on January 9, was murdered this Wednesday in Guayaquil.

“In the face of the murder of our colleague Cesar Suarez (…) I will say strongly: organized crime groups, criminals, terrorists will not stop our commitment to Ecuadorian society,” said Salazar in X.

– Salazar vs Correa –

Salazar was born in June 1981 in Ibarra, northern Andes and known as the White City with about 160 thousand inhabitants. According to what he told local media, his psychotic mother raised four children alone.

He studied political science, holds a doctorate in jurisprudence and several diplomas in human rights and the protection of people of African origin. In 2011, he became a local prosecutor.

He rose to the top position in 2019 and a year later he prosecuted popular former president Rafael Correa (2007–2017) for corruption and recommended a maximum sentence of eight years. Convicted and in exile in Belgium, from time to time he launches attacks: “Diana Salazar is so clumsy that she shows herself,” the former president wrote on January 8 on the X Network.

“My standard of values ​​does not include contacting, threatening or talking to convicted persons or fugitives from justice,” the prosecutor replied.

In 2016, Salazar called then-Vice President Jorge Glass to give his version of the investigation into public works embezzlement after the 2016 earthquake.

Glass then took refuge in the Mexican embassy in Quito, and the court ordered his preventive detention at the prosecutor’s request.

Salazar’s detractors criticize him for not pursuing the Correa attack and other related investigations.

But others defend her: “I would describe her as a woman of courage, talent and determination,” Gustavo Medina, a former attorney general who acts as state prosecutor, told AFP.

– “Anti-Corruption Heroine” –

Elected for a six-year term and through quality competition, Salazar racked up emblematic cases of corruption.

The most notable investigation involved the so-called FIFA Gate, which ended with the 10-year prison sentence of Luis Chiriboga, the former president of the Ecuadorian Football Federation, for money laundering.

He also oversaw a plot by Brazilian firm Odebrecht to pay bribes, for which Glass was sentenced to six years in prison in 2017.

Salazar has been called the Ecuadorian Loretta Lynch because of her resemblance to the Attorney General of the United States, who also exposed corruption structures and was the first black woman to hold the position in her country.

In 2021, the United States Department of State recognized Salazar as an “anti-corruption champion” as a “heroine example for judges, lawyers and prosecutors throughout South America”.

Although she has been criticized for her closeness to North Americans, Ecuador’s first female prosecutor, Mariana Ypez (1999–2005), believes that many of the claims are linked to machismo.

Salazar has reported racism and death threats against her and her daughter.