Lady Gissela Pachar Huanga, 41, was driving to a gym in Machala, Ecuador, on Monday, May 11, 2026, when two gunmen on a motorcycle pulled up alongside her vehicle and opened fire in broad daylight, killing the judge. Pachar, who presided over the multi-competence criminal court in nearby Santa Rosa, had two bodyguards assigned to her. Neither one was at her side when the shots were fired.
The shooting took place in the capital of El Oro province, near the Peruvian border. 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 — claimed her as its latest victim. A police source told AFP on Tuesday, May 12, that she had been threatened beforehand and was killed in retaliation for releasing gang members.
16 Killed Since 2022
As of the day Pachar died, Human Rights Watch had counted at least 16 judges or prosecutors slain in Ecuador since 2022. The Observatory of Rights and Justice keeps a wider tally that begins in 2020 and takes in court and prosecution staff as well as judges and prosecutors; by the time Human Rights Watch published a report on Ecuador in July, that count had reached 46 attacks and 28 deaths through June 2026. Marcos Mendoza, another judge, was among them. A motorbike-riding assassin shot him dead in October 2025 as he walked his children to school in Montecristi, Manabí province — a killing that held the country’s attention briefly before disappearing into the relentless cycle of cartel-related violence.
Ecuador sits at the center of the cocaine trade. Colombia and Peru rank as the world’s largest and second-largest producers, and roughly 70 percent of their product travels through the country’s ports and Pacific coastline. That strategic position has turned its courts, prisons and prosecutors’ offices into prime targets for trafficking networks that stay in business by corrupting or terrorizing the justice system.
The murder happened while a state of emergency declared specifically to combat organized crime was in force, feeding criticism of the government’s approach.
A Protective Detail That Was Not There
Officials had identified Pachar as a target, and Ecuador’s Judicial Council confirmed that protective measures had been put in place for her. On the day she was killed, those safeguards failed catastrophically.
“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 lapse had a precise explanation. One of the two police custodians assigned to her had left the province for a training course in Quito. As for the second, police said contact with the judge had been kept by telephone only, because she had shifted to working remotely. Col. Renato González, the National Police commander for Zone 7, which covers El Oro, confirmed that no agent was accompanying her when the gunmen struck. Threats against Pachar dated back to 2024. In October 2025, threatening pamphlets carried her name alongside those of four other Machala judges, prompting authorities to raise her personal risk rating.
Judges and prosecutors across Ecuador have pointed to the same systemic problem for years: protective details that exist in official records rather than on the ground. By the time her vehicle reached its destination, Pachar was dead and her killers had vanished.
Ecuador’s Judicial Council, in a statement released May 11, called the attack a “serious attack against justice and the rule of law in Ecuador” and demanded a full investigation. The Ecuadorian Association of Magistrates and Judges condemned the murder a day later, saying the case laid bare a grave deterioration in the conditions for practicing justice independently and safely, and asked the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the U.N. special rapporteur on judicial independence to speak out. On May 15, Mercedes Caicedo, the Judicial Council’s president, traveled to El Oro and filed a formal complaint over the killing at the provincial prosecutor’s office there. “We cannot die for our judicial decisions; that is not tolerated,” she said.
No Arrests, Four Months On
Nearly four months after the assassination, authorities have announced no arrests. A black motorcycle abandoned near a taxi stand and a white car found burned out on the vía La Primavera, its plates stripped, are both believed to have been used in the attack, but police have publicly named no suspect. Investigators are still examining whether Pachar was killed in retaliation for her rulings in organized crime cases, and a separate internal review is examining why her assigned protection was not in place.
She died in a pattern that has not broken. On June 14, a gunman killed prosecutor Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeño and her sister in Manta, on the Manabí coast, as Bravo walked to her car. She had handled homicide, kidnapping and organized crime cases, and she was the third prosecutor murdered in that city since 2022. The Attorney General’s Office called the killing a reprisal for the institution’s fight against organized crime. Two other officials from the prosecutor’s office had been killed the previous month. The attacks kept coming into August: public defender Lenín Zambrano Salcedo, 37, was shot dead in Manta on August 14. Then, three days later, on August 17, the secretary of the aquatic crimes unit at the Salinas prosecutor’s office in Santa Elena province, José Luis Merchán, was killed outside his workplace. In the Merchán case, three suspects were captured the following day 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 first took office in November 2023 and won a full term in 2025, and that stance has made him one of President Trump’s staunchest allies on the continent. Soldiers have gone into the streets and inside prisons on his orders, dramatic raids have hit drug strongholds, and states of emergency have been declared one after another. Those tactics have drawn fierce criticism from human rights groups, which have sounded alarms over security forces abusing their expanded powers.
A record 9,216 violent deaths were logged in the country in 2025, up about 32 percent from 6,964 the year before. The emergency decree in force the day Pachar was murdered was meant to prevent exactly this kind of contract killing. On paper, the trend has since turned: police reported about 515 fewer killings in 2026’s first half than in the same period of 2025 — a drop of roughly 11 percent in violent deaths — with the rate falling from 25.5 to 22.5 per 100,000 residents. Even so, a violent death occurred in Ecuador every 62 minutes 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. Across January through July the year-on-year fall had narrowed to about 7 percent. None of it has slowed the targeted killing of judicial officials.
American Commandos on the Ground
Washington has waded deeper into Ecuador’s security crisis as conditions have worsened. In early March 2026, the United States and Ecuador launched joint military operations against designated terrorist organizations.
American commandos joined Ecuadorian troops late in March 2026 in Operation Lanza Marina, which targeted a compound believed to function as a staging area for high-speed boats connected to Los Choneros, among the country’s most violent gangs. Speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the operation publicly, two U.S. officials said American forces worked in advisory roles and accompanied their Ecuadorian counterparts as they moved on the site.
The raid is one piece 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.
What Has Changed Since
The Judicial Council has answered with paperwork rather than arrests. Its governing body approved a comprehensive security plan for judicial staff on August 6, covering how security requests are handled, individual protection, psychological first aid and coordination with the police and the Interior Ministry — along with a technical guide for applying remote work in high-risk situations, the precise arrangement that left Pachar without an escort. A national diagnostic found 127 judicial employees had been threatened and 23 had been victims of violence. A day later the council approved a protocol letting judges appear as digital avatars rather than show their faces in high-risk virtual hearings.
El Oro, meanwhile, has become the country’s most violent province. Homicides there rose from 319 in the first half of 2025 to 521 in the same period of 2026, a jump of more than 60 percent that runs against the national trend, and 62 human heads have been found in the province this year. Col. González, the same commander quoted after Pachar’s killing, has since turned his fire on the courts, telling residents to take their complaints to judges and prosecutors rather than the police and linking the release of a gang leader to the surge in Machala. Human Rights Watch, in a July 21 report on the U.S.-Ecuador security partnership, documented the torture and arbitrary detention of four Colombian farm workers during a joint operation in Sucumbíos in early March. American operations expanded again in late August into northern Ecuador, with two U.S. warships, three Black Hawk helicopters and a decree allowing U.S. military personnel and contractors to stay 180 days without visas.
The Judicial Council’s statement looked 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 answered it in Manta a month later.