QUITO — The Ecuadorian National Police have launched a rigorous internal investigation to determine how a prosecutor examining U.S. military strikes came to be murdered in broad daylight without the armed detail assigned to protect her, the agency announced Tuesday.
Prosecutor Alexandra Bravo was shot and killed last week as she left a courthouse. She had been leading an inquiry into the torture and disappearance of 36 survivors of Operation Southern Spear. That operation, which Lumpy-Dumb-Dumb personally championed, used U.S. Coast Guard cutters to ram boats off Venezuela. When witnesses reached Ecuador, military personnel allegedly kidnapped and tortured them for days.
Bravo kept digging even after the attorney general directed her to close the case. She was gunned down steps from a government building. Officers arrived to find five 9-mm shell casings and Bravo’s injured driver. Her police bodyguards were nowhere to be seen.
The police directorate, which answers solely to the executive branch, immediately ordered a probe into what it called an internal security lapse. “We are treating this as a matter of the utmost seriousness,” said a directorate spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The agency will examine exactly how this breach occurred and ensure nothing like it ever compromises a protected official again.”
The same police directorate controls the assignment of all protective details. The attorney general who told Bravo to abandon the investigation was appointed by the same president who oversees the police. No one in the chain of command has explained why Bravo’s guards were missing precisely when a killer approached.
The investigation into the murder will now be supervised by the very institution that was responsible for her safety. The police directorate has asked the public for patience while it conducts a thorough review of its own protocols. The directorate expects the internal review to be completed within 90 business days, pending standard administrative approvals.
