Quito, June 16 (EFE).- The organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday asked the Government of Ecuador to adopt “urgent measures” to protect judges and prosecutors, after the murder last Sunday of prosecutor Alexandra Bravo in the coastal city of Manta, and demanded a “rapid, credible and impartial” investigation into the crime.
The human rights organization indicated in a statement that Bravo, murdered along with her sister, is the third prosecutor murdered in Manta since 2022.
The prosecutor was handling cases related to homicides, kidnappings and organized crime in the coastal province of Manabí, one of the most affected by the criminal activity that has plagued the country in recent years.
“The murder of Prosecutor Bravo is a tragedy, but unfortunately it is not an isolated event in Ecuador,” said HRW’s director for the Americas, Juanita Goebertus, who maintained that the Government of President Daniel Noboa must “stop treating the justice system as a secondary issue” and provide its officials with “the protection and resources they urgently need.”
HRW recalled that two other officials of the Prosecutor’s Office were murdered in May of this year and cited data from the Ecuadorian Observatory of Rights and Justice that indicates that at least 26 judges, prosecutors and other workers in the judicial system have been murdered in Ecuador since 2020.
“Judges and prosecutors in Ecuador often lack the most basic tools and security measures necessary to investigate organized crime groups,” said the organization, which urged the Government to “implement a comprehensive risk assessment system,” provide effective protection to threatened officials and fill the more than a thousand vacancies among judges and prosecutors.
“It is unlikely that Ecuador will be able to end its spiral of violence if it does not adopt urgent measures to protect the very officials who investigate criminal groups,” Goebertus added.
Ecuador has been living since 2024 under a state of “internal armed conflict” declared by Noboa to intensify the fight against organized crime gangs, which have been called “terrorists” and who are attributed with the escalation of violence that the Andean country has experienced in recent years.
Despite this declaration, the Andean country registered a record of 9,281 murders in 2025, which is equivalent to a rate of more than 50 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. EFE
