This article explores the investigation into the links between Ecuador's political and legal establishment and the country's drug gangs. It discusses the arrests of senior judges, prosecutors, police officials, prison officers, and defense lawyers who were part of an organized criminal scheme. The article also highlights the chaos that ensued, including riots in prisons controlled by the gangs.
How Ecuador ’s powerful gangs seized a TV station, pushed the country into chaos and led a young president to declare warprobe into links between parts of Ecuador ’s political and legal establishment and the country’s ruthless drug gangs. On Dec. 14, Ecuador ’s attorney general announced the
The country’s penitentiaries had become offices for the gangs to run their illicit businesses and arenas for them to wage war over turf. In 2021 and 2022, hundreds of people had died in gang-on-gang prison massacres. Now the gangs were challenging the state itself. Organized-crime groups have moved well beyond narcotics. They’ve created sprawling illicit industries in extortion, migrant smuggling and gold mining. Their power has become so great that they form a new kind of insurgency, infiltrating government operations.Ecuador was long known as an “island of peace,” an affordable and tranquil retirement destination for Americans. But after the end of Latin America’s commodities boom, and a 2016 earthquake in Ecuador, poverty and inequality rose.
Using the country’s prisons as command centers, Ecuadorian gangs have formed alliances with Mexican cartels and the Albanian mafia and infiltrated nearly every level of government in Ecuador. They have imported some of the gruesome violence associated with Mexico’s cartels, including decapitating victims and hanging them by their feet in public places. Children as young as 13The Jan.
As these criminal structures penetrate institutions in Ecuador and across the region, the rise or fall of murder rates depends less on government actions and more on alliances between criminal groups, said Renato Rivera, coordinator of Ecuador’s Organized Crime Observatory, an initiative funded by the U.S. State Department.
Noboa, 36, said he soon received a six-page letter from a leader of Los Lobos, asking for a meeting to negotiate a peace deal. The gang leader pledged to bring quiet to the country’s prisons and provide information to help dismantle rival gangs Salazar warned that the gangs were planning “something big” and that sophisticated weapons were being smuggled into prisons. But military and police intelligence received no specific warnings about an attack at a TV station, officials said. Salazar privately pleaded with authorities to capture a gang leader from Los Lobos, Fabricio Colón Pico, who had threatened to kill her. It wasn’t until she revealed the death threats in a public hearing that security forces detained him.
On the morning of Jan. 9, Noboa woke up at 5 a.m., as he often did, to work out in the gym a few doors down from his office in the presidential palace. While running on the treadmill, he saw on his phone that Colón Pico, only recently detained, had escaped from prison, crawling out of a hole he had carved in a prison wall.Noboa got off the treadmill and called the minister of government and acting interior minister, Mónica Palencia.
Alina Manrique, TC Televisión's editor in chief, was held hostage by gang members during the Jan. 9 attack. Manrique knelt on a toilet in a dark bathroom stall, huddled silently next to her two colleagues. She turned the brightness down on her phone and stuck it in her bra. She was shaking so much, she said, it felt like the toilet was coming loose. As the gunmen entered the bathroom, shouting for people to come out, Manrique and her colleagues walked out of the stall with their hands up.
another studio and trying to find an opening in the ceiling. They called a gang leader on the outside: Could he send help? Here we go, he said to himself. Just weeks earlier, Fitzpatrick had warned in a speech that the influence of the gangs was destroying the state. For many Ecuadorians, the ambassador’s indictment was self-evident, though somewhat unwelcome coming from aThe foreign minister called Fitzpatrick and told him the president would like to speak with him.The ambassador was invited straight up to Noboa’s office.
“Put your hands on your neck!” he shouted to the gunmen from behind a riot shield, according to body-camera footage provided to The Post. “Come to the front. Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you. … I’m talking to you. Put your weapon in the front where I can see it. Nothing will happen.” Gen. Alexander Levoyer, previously in charge of the armed forces in violent Esmeraldas province, was tasked with leading the operation. In a matter of hours, he moved troops, planes, tanks, armored vehicles and heavy weapons from the borders to the country’s main cities.
Troops, and a newly empowered police force, have been pushing into neighborhoods controlled by the gangs and raiding illicit drug facilities. In an operation in early February, police raided homes in one of Guayaquil’s most dangerous neighborhoods — they needed no warrant to do so under the declaration of armed conflict — and found weapons, dynamite, cocaine and marijuana. As of late March, security forces had detained 16,459 people.
“We’re using one of our last cards” Levoyer said of the government action. “Imagine if the armed forces fail, God forbid. Could Ecuador become a failed state?”
Ecuador Gangs TV Station Chaos Drug Trafficking Arrests Organized Crime Riots
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