When public debate in Ecuador seemed exhausted by old remedies against crime, the National Assembly led by Daniel Noboa has opened a stage of normative clash that aims to rewrite the state’s response to organized crime. What until recently were fragmented proposals based on more police, more military, or emergency decrees has evolved into an ambitious legislative package that seeks to update the Organic Integral Penal Code (COIP) to address crimes in both the physical and digital worlds. The processing and political defense of these initiatives found in the presidency of the Justice Committee a televisual and media figure such as the deputy Rosa Alegría Torres.
Rosa Torres, 29 years old, a legislator for the ADN bloc and recently elected to lead the Justice Committee, has placed at the center of the debate a combination of structural reforms and emergency measures: tightening penalties for ties to gangs, new typifications (ranging from collaboration with criminal economies to cybercrimes) and proposals to accelerate seizures and operational deployments.
From her office Torres has defended the need to “reorganize justice from its foundations” to recover institutional effectiveness. Her speeches and proposals show that, in practice, legislative innovation in Ecuador is no longer only technical: it is also a political bet on speed and a firm hand.
A RENOWNED SPANISH CRIMINAL LAWYER COLLABORATES IN THE ECUADORIAN LEGISLATIVE REFORM
The reform has also summoned external voices. In the last extraordinary session of the Justice Committee this October, the Spanish criminal lawyer Juan Gonzalo Ospina was presented as a rapporteur, invited as a consultant by the Ecuadorian authorities. Ospina, in his capacity as an expert in international criminal law, offered a double warning: the need to modernize the typifications for the digital century and, at the same time, the obligation to preserve proportionality in penalties and due process guarantees. “Without justice there is no freedom, and without security there is no justice,” he stated during his intervention, and he underscored the importance of equipping the State with technical tools – including a Central Cybersecurity Unit – capable of investigating technological crimes and coordinating international cooperation.
ECUADOR LEADS THE TRANSFORMATION
That dichotomy between punitive urgency and guarantor-based caution runs through the entire debate. On one hand, citizen pressure in the face of rising homicides and violence linked to territorial gangs pushes for quick and visible responses. On the other, human rights organizations and jurists warn of the risk of eroding guarantees if reforms are designed and implemented hastily and without institutional controls. Ospina insisted that typifying is necessary, but useless if not accompanied by investigative capacity, judicial training, and mechanisms for cooperation with digital platforms and other states.
“Typifying online harassment and impersonation could place the country at the regional forefront, closing gaps that, even in Europe, take time to resolve,” stated the Spanish expert, warning that “the speed of legislative change and the broadening of powers to expedite processes raise balances that the presidency of Rosie Torres will have to confront in practice, not only on paper, and for which I am fully at her disposal,” concluded one of the leading criminal lawyers in the international arena today.
THE DATA DRIVING THE ECUADORIAN GOVERNMENT
Why so much haste? Because the data compel. After relative calm in 2024, Ecuador is experiencing a bloody uptick in 2025: official records and independent analyses show pronounced increases in homicides and violence linked to territorial disputes between gangs. From January to July 2025, homicides grew by around 40% year over year, surpassing 5,000 murders in that period, and the semiannual figures reflect urban hot spots and cantons with extremely high rates. That reality explains the social and political pressure for immediate legislative and operational responses.
Compared with its neighbors, the Ecuadorian picture is mixed and worrying. Colombia maintains homicide rates substantially higher than the regional average (with figures running above 20–27 per 100,000 inhabitants according to official sources and national observatories in 2024), though with regional variations. Peru and Chile, by contrast, display lower rates nationally: figures around 6 homicides per 100,000 in 2024 for Peru and approximately 6 per 100,000 in Chile in 2024, although both countries face specific problems of organized violence in particular areas. In other words: Ecuador is not the only violence scenario in the region, but the pace of its recent deterioration and the territorial concentration of the conflict placed it in a state of alarm that the new government of Noboa wants to address.
