QUITO: Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa escaped unharmed after his motorcade was targeted by stone-hurling protesters and what one minister described as a volley of gunshots Tuesday.
Noboa was inaugurating a water treatment plant in central Ecuador when his motorcade was set on by a large group protesting rising fuel prices.
“About 500 people showed up and were throwing stones at him, and there are obviously bullet marks on the president’s car as well,” said Environment Minister Ines Manzano.
She said that five people were arrested and would stand trial on terrorism charges – an offense carrying a maximum punishment of 30 years behind bars.
“This kind of protests, which are not peaceful, are not what we need,” Manzano added.
Video released by the government, reportedly filmed from inside the motorcade, shows protesters standing in the road, draped in flags, scrambling to collect large stones and bricks.
As the presidential SUV passed, projectiles thudded into the paneling and shattered windows.
A voice can be heard shouting, “Heads down! Heads down!” as the vehicle sped away.
Officials said they were still investigating whether some of the impact marks on Noboa’s armored Chevrolet Suburban were caused by gunfire.
‘War policy’
The attack came amid days of increasingly violent demonstrations sparked by a government decision to raise diesel prices.
Protesters have gone on strike, blocked roads and abducted 16 soldiers – who were eventually released unharmed.
Ecuador’s largest Indigenous organization reported on Sunday that a protester had been killed by armed forces during one of the rallies.
Between protesters and security services, more than 100 people are believed to have been injured in the unrest.
Noboa has declared a state of emergency across several provinces.
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador said that the president’s convoy had “entered a resistance zone,” leading to “incidents that the government now uses to justify its war policy.”
The organization called to “resolve the crisis with justice and respect.”
Noboa’s office said on social media following the attack that “cowardly acts will not deter” the president.
The presidency shared messages of solidarity from the foreign ministries of Panama and Costa Rica, with condemnations also flowing in from other governments in the region, including Peru and Bolivia.
The recently re-elected president is trying to cut diesel subsidies to save about $1 billion in government spending, diverting much of the savings to security funding.
Ecuador, once considered one of Latin America’s safest nations, has seen a dramatic surge in violence in recent years.
Strategically located between Colombia and Peru – two of the world’s largest cocaine producers – Ecuador has become a major transit hub for narcotics.
Authorities have accused drug gangs of fueling the unrest, suggesting that criminal groups are exploiting the protests to destabilize the country.
It is estimated that 70 percent of the world’s cocaine supply passes through the country, much of it destined for the United States.
The trade has attracted international criminal organizations, including Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, Italy’s ‘Ndrangheta, and Albania’s mafia.
Their competition for control of trafficking routes has turned Ecuador into one of the region’s most dangerous places.
Noboa has called for a referendum to allow the return of US troops to the country, repealing a 2009 ban on foreign bases.
Ecuador president unharmed in attack on motorcade
https://arab.news/cj5z9
Ecuador president unharmed in attack on motorcade
- President Daniel Noboa was inaugurating a water treatment plant in central Ecuador when his motorcade was set on
- Attack came amid days of increasingly violent demonstrations sparked by a government decision to raise diesel prices
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
