Ecuador unrest: At least 10 dead and more taken hostage by cartels as President orders brutal crackdown in narco 'civil war'

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• Spain is following with 'concern' the crisis in Ecuador, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Wednesday.
• 'We are of course following with concern the events that have been taking place in recent days in that country, which needless to say we will support,' Sanchez said in Madrid, at an event with Spanish ambassadors.
• 'We are confident that normality will soon be restored,' the premier said, adding that Madrid 'backed democratic institutions'.

Admiral Jaime Vela, head of Ecuador's Joint Command of the Armed Forces, has described gangs as terror groups and said they are 'military objectives'.

• He described the acts of violence seen in the country as being a strategy to frighten the public.
• 'To achieve this, they have committed bloody and unprecedented acts in the history of the nation, but despite their brutal evil, this attempt will fail,' he said.
• Decree 111, signed by President Daniel Noboa, has given the country's military a very clear mission, he added.
• 'From this moment on, every terrorist group identified in decree (111) has become a military objective,' Vela warned the groups.

• President Daniel Noboa, who took office on November 23, has promised to eradicate violence through his so-called Phoenix Plan.
• He has not yet revealed details of the plan to the public.
• To face up to the crisis, Noboa decreed a state of emergency and curfew on Monday, tasking police and armed forces with enforcing compliance.
• It restricts the rights to move freely, to assemble and allows police entry into homes without a court order.
• But the attack on TC Television elicited another decree, this time recognising that the country possesses an armed, domestic conflict and identifying more than a dozen organisations as 'terrorists and belligerent non-state actors'.
• These groups include the Choneros, Lobos, Tiguerones and Aguilas.
• The decree also enabled the armed forces to carry out military operations 'to neutralise the identified groups', while observing international humanitarian law.

Read more about Ecuador's cartels here:

• The recent surge in violence began in February 2021 with a massacre inside the country's most violent prison, known as the Literol penitentiary.
• It left at least 79 dead, and sparked a series of shocking episodes within the Ecuadorian prisons.
• In September of the same year, the nation's worst prison massacre saw 116 inmates killed in a single prison, with several of them beheaded.
• A total 18 clashes inside prisons have killed more than 450 people.
• According to authorities, disputes between gangs inside the prisons prompted the death in December of 2020 of a Los Choneros leader, Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias Rasquina, in an attempt to usurp his power.
• This generated divisions among the local groups subsidiary to the gang, which are disputing control of territory to control drug distribution. Some of the gangs have ties to Mexico's Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels.
• Violence within the prison's walls has spread to the streets, with rampant kidnapping, murder, robbery and extortion that has made the country among the most violent in the region.

Will Freeman, a political analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, has said of the crisis in Ecuador: 'This is a turning point.'

Speaking to the Associated Press, he added that while gangs in Ecuador assassinated presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio and set off car bombs in front of government buildings, Tuesday's events marked a new peak in violence.

'Depending on how the government responds, it will set the precedent for these kinds of incidents to continue, or it will use this as a catalyst and make some very necessary structural reforms so that the state can start to win its war against crime,' Freeman said.

• A video circulating on social media showed three kidnapped police officers sitting on the ground with a gun pointed at them as one was forced to read a statement addressed to Noboa.
• 'You declared war, you will get war,' the visibly terrified officer read. 'You declared a state of emergency. We declare police, civilians and soldiers to be the spoils of war.'
• The statement added that anyone found on the street after 11pm 'will be executed.'

• Drug violence has taken a heavy toll on the South American country since it became a key stop on the US- and Europe-bound cocaine trade.
• The murder rate quadrupled from 2018 to 2022 and a record 220 tons of drugs were seized last year.
• Since February 2021, clashes between prisoners have left more than 460 dead, many beheaded or burnt alive.

Read more about Ecuador's gangs and their connections to Mexican drug cartels in MailOnline's article here:

• China's embassy and all its consulates in Ecuador will halt services to the public on Wednesday, it said in a statement.
• 'The reopening to the public will be announced in due course,' the embassy said in a press release in Spanish shared on social media site WeChat.

Long a peaceful haven sandwiched between top cocaine exporters Colombia and Peru, Ecuador has seen violence explode in recent years as rival gangs with links to Mexican and Colombian cartels vie for control.

On Tuesday, gangsters declared war following the prison escape Sunday of one of Ecuador's most powerful narco bosses.

After the escape of Jose Adolfo Macias, aka 'Fito' - leader of Ecuador's biggest gang Los Choneros - Noboa on Monday declared a countrywide state of emergency and nightly curfew.

Gangs retaliated, taking police officers hostage, setting off explosions in several cities and on Tuesday storming a studio of state-owned TC Television in Guayaquil with guns and explosives.

Police entered the studio after about 30 minutes of chaos.

President Daniel Noboa called the crisis an 'internal armed conflict' and ordered the military operations against gangs he described as 'terrorist organizations and belligerent non-state actors.'

A manhunt is under way for Fito, who had been serving a 34-year sentence for organized crime, drug trafficking and murder.

• Peru's Interior Ministry said on Tuesday that police special forces were being sent to the border to prevent any spillover from its neighbour.
• La Republica newspaper reported that Peruvian President Dina Boluarte had called an emergency meeting to 'take urgent measures to prevent thugs who escaped from [Ecuador's] prisons from entering Peru.'
• Peruvian Prime Minister Alberto Otarola wrote: 'Our solidarity with brotherly Ecuador in the face of the events it is facing. Peru's police are stepping up security measures in the border area with the neighboring country. A state of emergency will be declared along the entire northern border of Peru.'

Good morning and welcome to MailOnline's live coverage of the unfolding crisis in Ecuador, which was sparked by gunmen storming a TV studio.

• Last night, Ecuador's president gave orders to 'neutralize' criminal gangs after the gunmen opened fire and took hostages. Meanwhile, bandits threatened random executions on a second day of terror in the country.
• At least 10 people have been killed in a series of attacks blamed on gangs as the country exploded in what President Daniel Noboa called an 'internal armed conflict'.
• Eight people were killed and three were wounded in attacks in the port city of Guayaquil, and two officers were 'viciously murdered by armed criminals' in the nearby town of Nobol, police said Tuesday evening.

Follow MailOnline's live blog today for further updates...