Two gunmen riding a motorcycle pulled alongside Lady Gissela Pachar Huanga’s vehicle in Machala, Ecuador, and opened fire in broad daylight on Monday, May 11, 2026, killing the 41-year-old judge as she drove to a gym. Pachar worked in the criminal judicial unit and had been assigned two bodyguards, neither of whom was present when the shooting happened.
Machala is the capital of El Oro province, near the Peruvian border, and the assassination there added Pachar to the casualty list of Ecuador’s widening war between the state and the powerful cocaine trafficking organizations that have made this small Andean nation one of the deadliest places in Latin America. On Tuesday, May 12, a police source told AFP (Agence France-Presse) that the judge had been threatened and was targeted in retaliation for releasing gang members.
16 Judges and Prosecutors Killed Since 2022
Human Rights Watch counted at least 16 judges or prosecutors killed in Ecuador since 2022 as of Pachar’s death. The Observatory of Rights and Justice keeps a wider tally that begins in 2020 and takes in court and prosecution staff alongside judges and prosecutors; that figure stands at 26. One of those cases came in October 2025, when a motorbike-riding assassin gunned down another judge, Marcos Mendoza, as he walked his children to school in Montecristi, Manabi province — an attack that held the country’s attention briefly before it was swallowed by 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 Ecuadorian ports and the country’s Pacific coastline, putting Ecuador at the center of the cocaine trade. Traffickers depend on corrupting or terrorizing the justice system to keep operating, and that geography has made courts, prisons and prosecutors’ offices prime targets.
Critics of the government’s approach have seized on one detail of the killing: it happened while a state of emergency declared specifically to fight organized crime was in force.
Bodyguards Assigned, Absent on the Day
Authorities had flagged Pachar as a target, and Ecuador’s Judicial Council confirmed she had protective measures in place. Those safeguards failed catastrophically 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.
Officials could account for the gap precisely. One of the two police custodians assigned to the judge was in Quito at a training course, while the other, according to police, had been reaching her only by telephone after she switched to working remotely. Confirmation that no agent was at her side when the gunmen struck came from Col. Renato González, the National Police commander for Zone 7, which covers El Oro. The threats against her went back to 2024, and her name turned up in October 2025 alongside four other Machala judges on threatening pamphlets, which pushed authorities to raise her personal risk rating.
Judges and prosecutors across Ecuador have warned for years about exactly this disconnect between protection on paper and protection in practice: the details often exist in official records and nowhere else. Pachar was dead before her vehicle reached its destination, and her killers were gone.
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 in a statement released May 11. A day later, the Ecuadorian Judges’ Association condemned the murder on social media, writing: “Without independent judges, there is no justice.” A formal complaint over the killing was filed on May 15 at the provincial prosecutor’s office in El Oro by Mercedes Caicedo, the Judicial Council’s president, who said the institution wanted to keep the crime from going unpunished.
15 Weeks On, Still No Arrests
No arrests have been announced more than three months after the assassination. An incinerated motorcycle and a burned-out car believed to have been used in the attack turned up within about three hours of the shooting. Police recovered both, but no suspect has been named publicly. Investigators continue to look at whether Pachar was killed in retaliation for her rulings in organized crime cases, while a separate internal review examines why her assigned protection was missing.
The pattern that killed her has not broken. A gunman shot prosecutor Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeño and her sister dead 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 she became the third prosecutor murdered in that city 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: shot dead in Manta on August 14 was public defender Lenín Steven Zambrano Salcedo, 37, and killed outside his workplace on August 17 was José Luis Merchán, secretary of the aquatic crimes unit at the Salinas prosecutor’s office in Santa Elena province. 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 purpose of President Daniel Noboa’s presidency since he assumed power in November 2023, and it has made him one of President Trump’s staunchest allies on the continent. He has sent soldiers into the streets and inside prisons, ordered dramatic raids on drug strongholds and declared states of emergency again and again. Human rights groups have fiercely criticized those tactics, raising alarms about security forces abusing expanded powers.
Violent deaths hit a record 9,216 in 2025, up more than 30 percent from the 7,063 recorded the year before, and the state of emergency meant to prevent precisely these kinds of contract killings was in effect when Pachar was murdered. On paper, the trend has since turned. Violent deaths in the first half of 2026 ran roughly 11 percent below the same period of 2025, police reported — about 515 fewer killings, with the rate dropping from 25.5 to 22.5 per 100,000 residents. Even so, the country logged a violent death every 1.2 hours across those six months, and the gains have 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 deteriorated, Washington has stepped deeper into Ecuador’s security crisis. The United States and Ecuador began joint military operations against designated terrorist organizations in early March 2026.
In late March, American commandos went in with Ecuadorian troops on Operation Lanza Marina, which targeted a compound believed to function as a staging area for high-speed boats tied to Los Choneros, among the country’s most violent gangs. American forces served in advisory roles and accompanied their Ecuadorian counterparts as they moved on the site, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the operation publicly.
That raid is one piece of a broader effort to break up the maritime trafficking routes that have made Ecuador’s coastline a launch point for cocaine headed north. Whether escalation of that kind can keep officials like Pachar alive is another question. Her assassins hit her while she was alone, unprotected and following a predictable pattern — the sort of vulnerability the cartels exploit easily in a country where institutional corruption remains pervasive.
What the Judicial Council’s statement emphasized was the stake beyond a single death. A judiciary cannot function under intimidation or violence, it warned, and shielding its officers is fundamental to guaranteeing access to justice and the democratic order. The gunmen in Machala answered that argument on May 11. A month later in Manta, another pair answered it again.
