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 alongside her vehicle and opened fire in broad daylight, killing her. A judge in the criminal judicial unit, Pachar had two bodyguards assigned to her. Neither one was at her side when the shooting happened.
The capital of El Oro province, near the Peruvian border, was where she died. Ecuador’s escalating war between the state and powerful cocaine trafficking organizations claimed her as one more casualty, and that conflict ranks this small Andean nation among the deadliest places in Latin America. A source who told AFP (Agence France-Presse) on Tuesday, May 12, said she had been threatened beforehand; police described the motive as retaliation for her release of gang members.
16 Killed Since 2022
As of the day Pachar died, Human Rights Watch counted at least 16 judges or prosecutors slain in Ecuador since 2022. The Observatory of Rights and Justice keeps a broader tally that starts in 2020 and includes court and prosecution staff along with judges and prosecutors; it reaches 26. Among them was another judge, Marcos Mendoza, fatally shot in October 2025 outside a school in Manta, Manabí province, while dropping off his son. The country’s attention held on that killing only briefly before it disappeared into the relentless cycle of cartel-related violence.
Ecuador sits at the center of the cocaine trade. Roughly 70 percent of the cocaine out of Colombia and Peru — the world’s largest and second-largest producers — passes 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.
Sharpening criticism of the government’s approach, a state of emergency declared specifically to combat organized crime was in force when the murder took place.
A Protective Detail That Wasn’t There
Ecuador’s Judicial Council confirmed that protective measures had been arranged for the judge, whom officials had already marked out as a target. On the day she was killed, those safeguards failed catastrophically.
One of the two police guards assigned to her was out of the province for a training course in Quito. The other, police said, had been keeping only telephone contact with the judge 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. The threats against Pachar went back to 2024, and in October 2025 threatening pamphlets carried her name alongside those of four other Machala judges, which prompted authorities to raise her personal risk rating.
Judges and prosecutors across Ecuador have spent years flagging the same systemic problem: protective details that often exist only in official records rather than on the ground. Her killers were gone, and she was dead.
Ecuador’s Judicial Council, in a statement released May 11, condemned the attack as a “serious attack against justice and the rule of law in Ecuador” and demanded a full investigation. The Ecuadorian Judges’ Association condemned the murder a day later in a social media post: “Without independent judges, there is no justice.” 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, saying the institution wanted to keep the crime from going unpunished.
17 Weeks On, No Arrests
Nearly four months after the assassination, authorities have announced no arrests. A burned-out car and an incinerated motorcycle believed to have been used in the attack were found within about three hours of the shooting, but police have publicly named no suspect. Investigators are still examining whether Pachar was killed in retaliation for her rulings in organized crime cases. Officials have also opened a separate internal review of why her assigned protection was absent that day.
Killings of the kind that took her life have continued unabated. On June 14 in Manta, on the Manabí coast, a gunman killed prosecutor Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeño and her sister as Bravo walked to her car. Homicide, kidnapping and organized crime cases had filled her caseload, and that city had already seen two other prosecutors murdered before her since 2022, making Bravo the third. 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 continued into August. Public defender Lenín Steven Zambrano Salcedo, 37, was fatally shot in Manta on August 14. José Luis Merchán, secretary of the aquatic crimes unit at the Salinas prosecutor’s office in Santa Elena province, died outside his workplace on August 17, three days after that. Three suspects were captured in the Merchán case the following day, and a judge ordered them held in pretrial detention — a result the Pachar investigation has yet to produce.
Noboa’s Hard-Line Bet
President Daniel Noboa has built his presidency around confronting the cartels since he assumed power in November 2023. That stance has made him one of President Trump’s staunchest allies on the continent. Soldiers have gone to the streets and inside prisons on his orders, dramatic raids have hit drug strongholds, and he has declared one state of emergency after another. Human rights groups have fiercely criticized those tactics and sounded alarms over security forces abusing their expanded powers.
A record 9,216 violent deaths were logged in the country in 2025, up more than 30 percent from 6,964 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: police recorded roughly 11 percent fewer violent deaths in the first half of 2026 than in the same period of 2025 — about 505 fewer killings — with the rate falling from 25.5 to 22.5 per 100,000 residents. Ecuador still averaged 23 homicides a day across those six months, however, and the improvement has since stalled. Homicides in June and July 2026 both exceeded the totals for the same months of 2025. 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. American forces worked in advisory roles and accompanied their Ecuadorian counterparts as they moved against the site, said two U.S. officials, who were not authorized to discuss the operation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
That 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. When her assassins struck, she was alone, unprotected and following a predictable pattern — 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. On May 11, the gunmen in Machala answered that argument. Another set did the same in Manta a month later.