![The Crackdown](https://cdn.magzter.com/1422886351/1718606095/articles/hnCN_aa1s1718618000063/President-Daniel-Noboa-Ecuador.jpg)
Daniel Noboa's supporters praise his "mano dura"-his aggressive tactics in combatting organized crime. His critics fear that he is building an authoritarian state.
After several hours of closed-door meetings with security officials, Daniel Noboa, the recently elected President of Ecuador, sat in a darkened office of the Presidential palace—an elegant eighteenth-century building, known as Carondelet, that overlooks the old center of Quito. When I arrived for our first meeting, Noboa was at a wide, empty desk, staring intently at his phone. Several minutes passed in silence before he looked up, mumbling an apology. We shook hands, and I asked how he was doing. “Surviving,” he said. He didn’t mean this in the ordinary, mildly ironic, getting-through-the-day way. A week earlier, he explained, a dozen hit men had been intercepted crossing the border from Colombia, apparently sent by drug traffickers to kill him. Four of the would-be assassins had been killed in a shoot-out with Ecuadorian security forces. The rest were in detention, but there were presumably others out there. Now that he was President, he said with a rueful laugh, he would never be out of danger again.
Noboa’s story about hit men might have seemed exaggerated, not to mention impolitic, but a foreign diplomat in Quito later confirmed it to me. The diplomat was taken aback that Noboa was discussing a highly confidential incident, but, he said, the new President had not yet mastered the art of discretion. I spent several weeks this spring with Noboa, travelling around Ecuador, and found that he spoke in an unfiltered way about most things, including his dangerous circumstances. Only a few months into his Presidency, he was overseeing an “internal armed conflict” against twenty-two criminal gangs that, taken together, constituted one of the most powerful forces in the country.
This story is from the June 24, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the June 24, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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![The Crackdown](https://reseuro.magzter.com/100x125/articles/8859/1736039/hnCN_aa1s1718618000063/crp_President-Daniel-Noboa-Ecuador.jpg)
The Crackdown
Fighting drug gangs, a young President declares war within his own country.
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In Search of Lost Time
The strange journey of John Lennon's stolen Patek Philippe watch.
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Books – Everything in Hand
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UNHOLY TRINITY
“Kinds of Kindness.”
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HERO BALL
Who was the main character of the N.B.A. Finals?
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MEDIEVAL LONGING
The fourteenth-century love songs of Guillaume de Machaut.
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Harriet Tubman’ radical faith.
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THE TAIWAN TANGLE
Can we deter belligerence in the strait without provoking it?
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VINCENT'S PARTY
The party was in full swing. Evelyn could hear the sexy blare of the trad jazz almost as soon as she got off the bus at St. Mary Redcliffe and began walking over to the Steam Packet, the pub that Vincent—who was a friend of Evelyn’s older sister, Moira—had commandeered for the evening.
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GROWING PAINS
In Phoenix's upscale suburbs, authorities slowly realized that the Gilbert Goons might be a violent teen gang.