A wave of gang violence has rocked Ecuador after the disappearance of a powerful drug gang boss from jail, prompting the government to declare a state of emergency as it struggles to tackle a crime wave in the Andean nation.
Adolfo Macías, leader of the feared Los Choneros gang who is better known by his alias Fito, was first reported missing from his cell in the Regional prison complex in the violent port city of Guayaquil on Sunday.
Authorities said two prison officials had been charged for alleged involvement in a probable escape, while 3,000 police officers and soldiers have been dispatched for the manhunt, which continued on Tuesday.
President Daniel Noboa declared a 60-day nationwide state of emergency, which includes a nightly curfew and the authorisation of soldiers to assist in quelling prison violence after riots broke out in six jails and an unknown number of guards were taken hostage following Fito’s disappearance.
“We are not going to negotiate with terrorists,” Noboa, a 36-year-old business heir who took office in November promising to halt the country’s spiralling security crisis, said late on Monday. “These narcoterrorist groups intend to intimidate us and believe that we will give in to their demands.”
On Tuesday afternoon, in an updated decree that declared the Choneros and other gangs to be terrorist groups, Noboa said that Ecuador was living through an “internal armed conflict”.
Once a relatively peaceful country surrounded by more violent neighbours, Ecuador has struggled to contain a surge in crime driven by drug gangs competing to secure profitable trafficking routes and build links with cartels from Mexico, Albania and other countries. The country’s per capita murder rate in 2023 — 46.5 per 100,000 people — has increased eightfold since 2018 and is among the highest in the region.
Despite the state of emergency, the country was rocked by several violent incidents, the police said on Tuesday.
A television station in Guayaquil was stormed by masked gunmen live on air. The broadcast showed staffers sitting and lying prone as their assailants stalked the set, brandishing firearms and grenades. Yells of “no police” could be heard before the signal eventually cut out. The police later said that all the intruders had been arrested after a task force was dispatched to the scene.
In the 24 hours before the raid, at least seven Ecuadorean police officers were kidnapped by criminals around the country, including in Machala, a south-western city, and in the capital Quito, where a vehicle carrying liquefied petroleum gas was set ablaze at a petrol station.
In Cuenca, a hilltop city popular with tourists, unknown assailants launched an explosive at a military truck, according to authorities. In Esmeraldas, a coastal province that has suffered some of the worst of the violence, three attacks with explosives were reported by police.
Another jailbreak took place in Riobamba, in the central Andes, with 32 inmates escaping, including Fabricio Colón, one of the leaders of the Los Lobos gang, the town’s mayor told local website Primicias. Twenty escapees were recaptured, though Colón is among those still at large.
The nation was traumatised in August when centre-right presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated by gunmen ahead of November’s snap election. Before his assassination at a rally in Quito, Villavicencio said the Choneros had threatened him, though authorities have not connected the group with his murder.
Amid the violence, prisons have fallen under the control of the gangs, who often use them as bases for their operations and staging grounds for street battles. More than 400 inmates have died in the past four years, with many massacres taking place within the Regional complex where Macías was being held.
Roberto Izurieta, a government spokesperson, said in a television interview on Monday that the country’s penitentiary system had “completely failed”, and that Macías was expected to be transferred to a maximum-security facility just hours before his disappearance.
On the campaign trail, Noboa pledged to house criminals on a prison ship, and since taking office his administration has said it would seek to build a large maximum-security jail in the Amazon jungle.
Criminal activity began to flourish in Ecuador in the past decade during the leftwing government of Rafael Correa, who took a lax approach to drug trafficking so long as violent crime was kept low.
Lenin Moreno and Guillermo Lasso, his more moderate successors, failed to stop violence in jails from spreading to the streets, with their faltering security policies partly responsible for their low popularity rates when they left office.
The Choneros gang, one of Ecuador’s largest, is heavily involved in drug trafficking and extortion and, according to authorities, has links with Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel as well as several Colombian trafficking groups. An alleged leader of the powerful Los Lobos drug gang, a splinter group of Choneros, was arrested in November.
Macías, who was serving a 34-year sentence, was convicted of drug trafficking, organised crime and murder in 2011. In February 2013, he escaped from prison but was recaptured weeks later.
Noboa’s government aims to hold a referendum that would allow for the extradition of citizens accused of crimes abroad and the seizure of suspects’ assets. The vote still requires approval from the country’s constitutional court before it can go ahead.