Top Criminal Takedowns of 2025

Fito’s run as the Choneros’ top fugitive leader came to a dramatic end in 2025. 

After helping run a criminal empire from behind bars for over a decade, Fito escaped from a maximum security prison in Ecuador on January 7, 2024. How he managed it remains a mystery. He was scheduled to be transferred to another prison, but when the guards arrived to move him, his cell was empty. 

His escape sparked an escalation in Ecuador’s fight against organized crime. 

President Daniel Noboa launched a manhunt for Fito, deploying thousands of soldiers onto the streets and into the prisons. The crackdown prompted a backlash, and armed groups attacked public institutions, including prisons, police stations, businesses, and hospitals—even taking over a live television news broadcast on air. Then Noboa declared Ecuador was in an “internal armed conflict” and designated 22 criminal groups as “terrorist organizations.”

Noboa’s government offered a $1 million reward for any information leading to Fito’s arrest. But for a year and a half, Ecuador’s most-wanted criminal evaded capture.

Finally, in June 2025, Fito was found holed up in a bunker underneath an opulent mansion just outside his hometown of Manta. 

After his arrest, Fito was returned to La Roca, another prison he had previously escaped, that time in 2013. Less than a month later, he was extradited to the United States to face drug trafficking and weapons charges.

Lobos leader Pipo was finally arrested in Malaga, Spain, on November 16, 2025, in a joint operation between Spanish and Ecuadorian authorities. 

His capture was years in the making. 

Like many Ecuadorian criminal leaders, Pipo’s ascent to infamy began behind bars. After being nabbed for robbing banks in Cuenca, he was sent to prison, where he met the charismatic leader of the Choneros, Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias “Rasquiña,” Fito’s predecessor. Rasquiña recruited Pipo, absorbing his group, the Lobos, into the Choneros’ criminal syndicate. 

When Rasquiña was murdered in December 2020, Pipo’s Lobos and a few other factions broke away from the Choneros, now led by Fito. The split sparked a war between the groups, with violent clashes in the prisons that killed hundreds. 

On just one day in February 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic,  prison riots in Guayaquil, Cuenca, and Latacunga left 79 dead. Pipo took advantage of the chaos to escape and had a false death certificate made. He allegedly fled to Venezuela, then to Colombia, and finally to Spain in 2022. 

Pipo went a step beyond fake IDs: He allegedly had seven facial reconstruction surgeries to change his appearance. 

For the next few years, he lived mainly between Dubai and Spain, where he stayed in luxury hotels and mansions and commanded the Lobos from afar. In Ecuador, the feud between criminal groups was reaching new heights. The violence peaked in August 2023, when an anti-corruption candidate for president, Fernando Villavicencio, was murdered during a campaign rally. Prosecutors believe the Lobos, led by Pipo, may have been  behind the assassination.

Pipo was eventually caught after he was flagged for using false documents when traveling from Morocco to Spain. He is awaiting extradition in a Spanish prison. 

Dritan Gjika is the head of the Albanian mafia in Ecuador and for years was one of the country’s most-wanted foreign criminals. 

How did he manage to stay under the radar? Friends in high places.

Gjika first arrived in 2009 on a short-term visitor visa, and set about building a transnational drug trafficking network that smuggled cocaine to Europe in banana shipments. He protected his operations by allegedly cultivating relationships with some of Ecuador’s top businesspeople and government officials — including the brother-in-law of former President Guillermo Lasso and the head of police. 

Gjika was meticulous about covering his tracks, coordinating a network of contractors to manage his operations, complicate the paper trail, and keep his hands clean. To launder his illicit profits, he set up multiple front companies in various countries. Gjika and his business partner founded eight companies in Ecuador on a single day in June 2021.

For several years, investigations circled around his illegal dealings and shady partners, but his well-connected associates helped keep him safe. Then in 2023, Gjika’s name was finally thrust into the spotlight when a corruption scheme, a former police investigation, and a report on his drug trafficking activities were published, sparking a political scandal around the ties between traffickers and politicians. The fallout included the impeachment of then-President Lasso.  

Gjika allegedly fled Ecuador the day that one of the investigations went public. About a year later, authorities tracked him to his home on the outskirts of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s biggest port city. Over 50 raids arrested more than 30 people, but when they stormed the two-story villa in a luxury gated community, Gjika was nowhere to be found.  

For over a year, authorities tracked him through multiple countries, including Turkey, before finally locating him in the United Arab Emirates. He was arrested on May 26, 2025 in Abu Dhabi in an operation led by Interpol. 

Shoppers in a local mall in Chiapas, Mexico were interrupted by dozens of police in April 2025, there to arrest Guatemala’s most-wanted fugitive. 

But despite the police operation, Chicharra described his arrest as no drama: “The officers were polite when they arrived. They told me I was a good man and said I had to go with them. They didn’t put me in handcuffs, and I thanked them.” 

Chicharra was a top leader of the Huistas drug clan, and had been on the United States’ list of most-wanted fugitives for the six years leading up to his arrest in Mexico. 

He oversaw the Huista’s trafficking operations, coordinating the transportation of drug shipments from the gang’s mountainous stronghold in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, into the Mexican state of Chiapas, according to US authorities. 

It took years to track Chicharra down, with US, Guatemalan, and Mexican authorities involved in the search. Attempts to arrest him were repeatedly compromised by intelligence leaks, according to investigators, as well as Huehuetenango locals who protected him. They almost nabbed him in November 2024, but Chicharra slipped through their fingers and fled to Mexico. 

When they finally tracked him down in the mall in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, he was without bodyguards and claimed to have never had them.

He was deported to Guatemala and, shortly after, extradited to the United States on May 9. He faces criminal charges in both Guatemala and the United States.

Araña was seemingly seeking peace when he was arrested on February 12, 2025. He was taking part in a press conference in the Courtyard Marriott Hotel in Bogotá, Colombia, speaking for the Border Command following its third round of peace negotiations with the Colombian government. 

His comrades protested his detention because the Colombian government had promised to suspend warrants for peace negotiation participants. But the Colombian government countered that Araña’s arrest was based on an Interpol red notice requested by the United States and that the suspension did not apply.  

Araña had a long career in Colombia’s crime wars. He started as a member of a former paramilitary group and then joined forces with various factions of dissidents from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC), formed it signed a peace deal with the Colombian government, and disarmed in 2016.  

The Border Command formed in 2017, and Araña became the group’s top leader in 2019 after his predecessors were killed or captured. 

When the group decided to participate in peace negotiations with the Colombian government in October 2022, Araña was named as its representative. 

He has been awaiting extradition to the United States since his arrest.

The arrest of Costa Rica’s former Security Minister and Supreme Court Magistrate Celso Gamboa Sánchez was a clear sign of how the narco rot had penetrated the country’s highest echelons. 

Long considered one of the most powerful figures in the country’s judicial and security institutions, Gamboa Sánchez was arrested in San José in June 2025 on charges of conspiracy to traffic and distribute cocaine destined for the United States. 

His arrest was a decade in the making. He began his career as a prosecutor in the mid ‘90s, and over the next 15 years rose through the political ranks: vice minister of public security and then minister of public security, deputy attorney general, and finally supreme court justice in 2016.

Gamboa’s rise gave him strong influence over law enforcement and legal cases, a power investigators say he exploited for criminal purposes.

His fall from grace began when he was suspended from his position on the Supreme Court in 2017 for his ties to the construction magnate Juan Carlos Bolaños, who was implicated in a corruption scandal known as “El Cementazo.” Bolaños received over $30 million in loans from the Costa Rican National Bank to import Chinese cement, according to the case’s conclusions. Gamboa Sánchez became the first judge ever to be dismissed from Costa Rica’s Supreme Court for influence peddling in April 2018. 

His story exemplifies the corrosive effect of Costa Rica’s increasingly important role in the region as a transshipment point for cocaine bound for Europe and the United States. US authorities identified Gamboa Sánchez as the Costa Rica-based coordinator of a regional drug trafficking network tied to Colombia’s Clan del Golfo, also known as the Gaitanistas, as well as the Sinaloa Cartel, one of Mexico’s most powerful criminal organizations. 

A constitutional amendment passed in May 2025 allows Costa Rican citizens to be extradited for drug trafficking offenses. The United States wants Gamboa Sánchez to face trial in its courts, but for the moment, he remains in Costa Rica awaiting the resolution of domestic cases involving alleged document forgery and bribery.