Ecuador became the latest Latin American nation to turn to a militarized response to combat organized crime in 2024. But the crackdown has missed its mark, leading to a reorganization rather than destruction of the country’s criminal groups.
Ecuador’s security struggles were pushed onto the international spotlight on January 8 and 9 when criminal groups launched coordinated attacks around the country against prison guards, security officials, and public institutions. Armed men also stormed a television station, taking staff hostage live on air.
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The attacks came hours after authorities discovered that José Adolfo Macías Villamar, alias “Fito,” the leader of the Choneros criminal group, had fled his cell in Guayaquil’s La Regional prison.
In response to Fito’s escape and the attacks, President Daniel Noboa declared an “internal armed conflict,” labeling members of 22 criminal groups “terrorists,” and announcing the expansion of the military’s presence in both the streets and the prison system.
“I have given clear and precise instructions to military and police commanders to intervene in the control of prisons,” Noboa said in a January 8 video address. “We will not negotiate with terrorists.”
To an international audience, the attacks were surprising, but to Ecuadorians, they were a continuation of a disturbing trend.
Over the past five years, criminal groups with roots in the prison system have expanded their operations throughout Ecuador. They have increasingly come to blows with each other over territory for drug trafficking and dealing, as well as predatory crimes like extortion and kidnapping.
Largely as a result of these conflicts, the country’s homicide rate jumped to a record 47 per 100,000 residents in 2023, up from just 6 per 100,000 in 2018. Criminal groups’ homicide victims in 2023 included a leading presidential candidate and numerous public officials.
Now, one year after the internal armed conflict declaration, the government has disrupted criminal groups with force, seizing control of the prisons system, arresting many high-level gang leaders, and forcing others to flee the country. Murders dropped about 20% in 2024, and security forces seized a record quantity of drugs.
But there’s no sign of a long term plan to combat the root causes of Ecuador’s crime problem. And there is already evidence of new, emerging criminal norms in both the prisons and the streets.
Rearranging the Prisons
The government’s strategy has centered around imposing state presence in the prisons, and it may have dislodged prisons from the center of the Ecuadorian underworld. But there is little indication that the Noboa administration plans to address the roots of the prison problem.
Ecuador’s prison system has become a key criminal node, serving as an incubator for groups like the Choneros, who transformed from a local drug trafficking gang based in the coastal city of Manta to the country’s largest criminal organization.
After Choneros leader Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias “Rasquiña,” and other top members were imprisoned in 2011, the group used a combination of pragmatism and force to build a criminal fiefdom behind bars. They forged connections with other incarcerated criminals and drug traffickers, recruited new members from the general prison population, and coordinated operations outside the prisons with impunity. When rivals threatened their ascendancy, they were brutally murdered.
The Choneros consolidated influence over daily life in the prisons, charging prisoners for necessities like food and family visits, while also overseeing illicit economies that cater to prisoners’ wants, like contraband, drug dealing, and arms trafficking. InSight Crime estimated the total value of these economies at over $200 million per year.
Now, following the violence of 2023 and the January 2024 attacks, Noboa has charged the military with permanently dismantling prison mafias like the Choneros. The armed forces have largely taken over day-to-day operations in the prisons from heavily corrupt and low-resourced prison authority. This has put criminal groups on the back foot, severing communication and forcing many top gang leaders to seek refuge outside Ecuador.
SEE ALSO: Behind Bars, Beyond Control: The Fall of Ecuador’s Prisons and the Rise of Its Mafias
But reporting by InSight Crime and local media has shown that criminal economies persist inside the prisons, and that members of the military are assuming control over some of them.
As visits by family to prisons were banned at the start of the prison crackdown, soldiers allegedly collected bribes in exchange for allowing prisoners access to phones to contact their family, relatives of prisoners told InSight Crime in May. Arrests of members of the military at prisons in possession of phones and other contraband provide further evidence of soldiers’ growing involvement in prison economies. Meanwhile, reporting by Primicias suggests the military still has not eliminated other economies like food provision behind bars.
Chaos Reigns in the Street
Displacing prisons as organized crime’s base of operations has resulted in profound shifts in the rest of Ecuador, fragmenting the country’s largest criminal organizations – the Choneros, Lobos, and Tiguerones.
Before the intervention, many local gang leaders looked to their higher-ups in prison as sources of drugs and arms. In return, local bosses would control territory in the name of the prison mafia and provide drug trafficking services. After the military crackdown, this relationship between the prisons and streets has become more horizontal.
Homicides across Ecuador dropped substantially in January and February, after the crackdown began. Some criminal groups suspended activities, lacking orders from their leaders and wary of the military’s enhanced presence in the streets.
But homicides spiked in March, and continued to rise as gangs reemerged, seeking to adapt to the new criminal landscape. Crimes like extortion and kidnapping soared. Rival gangs launched a series of brutal attacks in illegal mining zones in the provinces of Azuay and El Oro.
Local gangs now see less benefit in maintaining fixed alliances with prison mafias, choosing autonomy and fluid identities. This has inflamed tensions in the streets as well as within gangs.
In Durán, one of Ecuador’s most violent municipalities, security forces and government officials told InSight Crime that the violence is driven not only by the rivalry between its two main criminal groups, the Chone Killers and the Latin Kings, but also between warring Chone Killers factions.
A New Order?
Ecuador’s reliance on a heavy-handed approach to combat organized crime has produced a fragmented, delicate security landscape that shows little signs of changing in 2025.
“There is still a power struggle and now the military is involved, adding to this web of complicity of officials at all levels…It is quite fragile and very dangerous,” Karol Noroña, an Ecuadorian investigative journalist and prisons expert, told InSight Crime.
Noroña referenced a November massacre in the Litoral Penitentiary that left 17 dead and over a dozen injured as an example. Assassinations of prison officials, rising violence in mining regions, and surging mass killings also show how criminal violence is still at the center of everyday life in Ecuador.
SEE ALSO: Jailhouse Massacre in Ecuador Illustrates Rapid Criminal Evolution
As a result, citizen security will still be one of the biggest issues on the ballot in February, when Noboa will face other presidential hopefuls in the election’s first round. Ecuadorians previously expressed their support for his administration’s heavy-handed approach to crime in an April referendum that saw a number of issues, including the deployment of armed forces to fight organized crime, receive overwhelming approval. Noboa has also boasted lower homicides this year compared to last, the capture of high-level gang leaders residing abroad, and plans to open a new mega prison.
Early polling suggests Noboa’s main opponent will be Luisa González of the Citizen Revolution Movement (Movimiento Revolución Ciudadana – RC), who Noboa faced in the October 2023 snap election. During the campaign, González initially rejected hardline approaches to Ecuador’s security crisis, but changed tact closer to the election, promising to use the military to “take back control of the country.”
Regardless of the election outcome, the government will struggle to make long-term progress against organized crime, especially as its main strategy, based on punitive policies and militarization, remains the same.
“I don’t see much of a way out because I don’t see the debate going to how we are going to reinsert [incarcerated] people,” Jorge Núñez, co-founder of Ecuador’s Kaleidos ethnographic research center, told InSight Crime. “People continue to believe that the problem of organized crime is going to be solved with punishment and prisons.”