Two gunmen on a motorcycle pulled up alongside a judge’s vehicle in Machala, Ecuador, and opened fire in broad daylight on Monday, May 11, 2026, killing Lady Gissela Pachar Huanga, 41, as she drove to a gym. Pachar, who worked in the criminal judicial unit, had two bodyguards assigned to her. Neither was with her when the shooting happened.
She was shot in the capital of El Oro province, near the Peruvian border, and her death made her the latest victim of Ecuador’s escalating war between the state and powerful cocaine trafficking organizations — a conflict that ranks this small Andean nation among the deadliest places in Latin America. Retaliation for her release of gang members was the motive described by a police source, who told AFP (Agence France-Presse) on Tuesday, May 12, that she had been threatened beforehand.
16 Killed Since 2022
Human Rights Watch counted at least 16 judges or prosecutors slain in Ecuador since 2022 as of the day Pachar died. A wider tally kept by the Observatory of Rights and Justice, which begins in 2020 and takes in court and prosecution staff as well as judges and prosecutors, reaches 26. Among them was another judge, Marcos Mendoza, shot dead in October 2025 by a motorbike-riding assassin as he walked his children to school in Montecristi, Manabi province. That killing held the country’s attention briefly before disappearing into the relentless cycle of cartel-related violence.
Roughly 70 percent of the product from Colombia and Peru — the world’s largest and second-largest producers — moves through Ecuador’s ports and Pacific coastline, placing the country at the center of the cocaine trade. That strategic position has made its courts, prisons and prosecutors’ offices prime targets for trafficking networks that stay in business by corrupting or terrorizing the justice system.
Adding to criticism of the government’s approach, the murder came while a state of emergency specifically declared to combat organized crime was in force.
A Protective Detail That Wasn’t There
Officials had identified Pachar as a target, and Ecuador’s Judicial Council confirmed that protective measures had been put in place for her. Those safeguards failed catastrophically on the day she was killed.
“It should be noted that the judge had previously been assigned protective measures; however, these measures were not in place at the time of the attack,” the council said in a translated statement.
The gap was specific. A training course in Quito had taken one of the two police custodians assigned to her out of the province; the second, according to police, had been keeping only telephone contact with the judge because she had shifted to working remotely. No agent was accompanying her when the gunmen struck, a fact confirmed by Col. Renato González, the National Police commander for Zone 7, which covers El Oro. Threats against Pachar dated back to 2024. Her name then appeared in October 2025 alongside those of four other Machala judges on threatening pamphlets that prompted authorities to raise her personal risk rating.
Judges and prosecutors throughout Ecuador have spent years pointing to the same systemic problem: protective details that frequently exist only in official records rather than on the ground. Her killers had vanished by the time her vehicle reached its destination, and she was dead.
In a statement released May 11, Ecuador’s Judicial Council condemned the attack as a “serious attack against justice and the rule of law in Ecuador” and demanded a full investigation. A day later, the Ecuadorian Judges’ Association condemned the murder in a social media post: “Without independent judges, there is no justice.” A formal complaint over the killing was filed at the provincial prosecutor’s office in El Oro on May 15 by Mercedes Caicedo, the Judicial Council’s president, who traveled there and said the institution wanted to keep the crime from going unpunished.
15 Weeks On, No Arrests
No arrests have been announced by authorities more than three months after the assassination. A burned-out car and an incinerated motorcycle believed to have been used in the attack turned up within about three hours of the shooting, though police have named no suspect publicly. Whether Pachar was killed in retaliation for her rulings in organized crime cases is still being examined by investigators, while a separate internal review is under way into why her assigned protection was not in place.
The pattern she died in has not broken. A gunman killed prosecutor Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeño and her sister on June 14 in Manta, on the Manabi coast, as Bravo walked to her car. Homicide, kidnapping and organized crime cases had been her caseload, and in that city she was the third prosecutor murdered since 2022. A reprisal for the institution’s fight against organized crime was how the Attorney General’s Office called the killing. The previous month, two other officials from the prosecutor’s office had been killed. Into August the attacks kept coming. On August 14 in Manta, public defender Lenín Steven Zambrano Salcedo, 37, was shot dead; three days later, on August 17, José Luis Merchán, secretary of the aquatic crimes unit at the Salinas prosecutor’s office in Santa Elena province, was killed outside his workplace. The following day, three suspects were captured in the Merchán case and ordered held in pretrial detention — an outcome the Pachar investigation has yet to produce.
Noboa’s Hard-Line Bet
Confronting the cartels has been the organizing principle of President Daniel Noboa’s presidency since he assumed power in November 2023, a stance that has made him one of President Trump’s staunchest allies on the continent. He has put soldiers in the streets and inside prisons, ordered dramatic raids against drug strongholds and declared one state of emergency after another. Human rights groups have fiercely criticized those tactics, sounding alarms over security forces abusing their expanded powers.
A record 9,216 violent deaths were logged in 2025, up more than 30 percent from 7,063 the year before, and the emergency decree in force the day Pachar was murdered was meant to prevent exactly these types of contract killings. On paper, the trend has since turned: about 515 fewer killings were recorded in the first half of 2026 than in the same period of 2025 — roughly 11 percent fewer violent deaths, police reported, with the rate falling from 25.5 to 22.5 per 100,000 residents. Even so, a violent death occurred in Ecuador every 1.2 hours across those six months, and the improvement has since stalled, with homicides in June and July 2026 both exceeding the totals for the same months of 2025. None of it has slowed the targeted killing of judicial officials.
American Commandos on the Ground
As conditions have worsened, Washington has stepped deeper into Ecuador’s security crisis. The United States and Ecuador launched joint military operations against designated terrorist organizations in early March 2026.
Late in March 2026, American commandos joined Ecuadorian troops in Operation Lanza Marina. Its target was a compound believed to function as a staging area for high-speed boats connected to Los Choneros, among the country’s most violent gangs. Two U.S. officials, who were not authorized to discuss the operation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said American forces worked in advisory roles, accompanying their Ecuadorian counterparts as they moved against the site.
That raid forms part of a wider push to dismantle the maritime trafficking routes that have made Ecuador’s coastline a departure point for northbound cocaine shipments. Whether escalation of that kind can safeguard officials like Pachar remains doubtful. She was alone, unprotected and following a predictable pattern when her assassins struck — precisely the type of vulnerability the cartels exploit easily in a nation where institutional corruption remains pervasive.
The Judicial Council’s statement pointed past the death of one woman. A judiciary cannot function under intimidation or violence, it warned, and its officers must be protected if access to justice and the democratic order are to be guaranteed. The gunmen in Machala answered that argument on May 11. Another set did the same in Manta a month later.
