“Good evening, Ecuadorian people. We have come to read this statement on behalf of our leader, ‘Pipo’, and the minor Esteban. We want to make it very clear to the entire Ecuadorian nation that every time corrupt politicians don’t keep their promises that we establish when they receive our money, which is millions of dollars, to finance their campaign, they will be discharged”. Thus begins a video in which a group of hooded men, carrying weapons in their hands, claim responsibility for the death of the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.”We, the organization Los Loboswe assume responsibility for the events that occurred this afternoon,” they point out, referring to the murder.

And, in addition, they anticipate that “it will be repeated when the corrupt do not keep their word.” “You too, Jan Topic“, they advance, pointing directly to Jan Tomislav Topić Feraud, also a presidential candidate, who is running for the Christian Social Party. “If you don’t comply, you’ll be next.” The video in which a group that would supposedly form part of this band has been published on social networks, among others, by the Nicaraguan journalist Benjamin Rubenstein, whose veracity has not yet been confirmed.

The Wolves is the second criminal grouping of Ecuador, with some 8,000 members distributed throughout the country’s prisons, according to ‘Insight Crime’. It is one of the bands that participated in the Ecuador prison massacres in 2021, when more than 300 deaths were recorded. The group was born as a split from Los Choneros and maintains a strategic alliance with the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel, which disputes control of cocaine routes in the country.

‘Pipo’, to which they refer in the video, is Wilmer Chavarria, who is believed to have been killed during one of the riots that year. He current leader of Los Lobos It is believed that he could be the son of the ‘Pipo’ couple, whom they name as the “minor Esteban”, but experts also point to ‘Ariel’, whose name is Alexander Quesada.

Who are Los Choneros?

Some two decades of activity, a leader who has been since the death of the previous head of the band and a few murders on his record: The group of Los Choneros has everything to be qualified as the largest criminal gang in Ecuador. The exact origin of birth of the Choneros It is not clearly known: in the 1990s there was already talk of them, as an organization dedicated to drug trafficking located in the city of Manta, on the Pacific coast of Ecuador. The authorities, at that time, identified her as a local armed wing of a Colombian cartelalthough today they have their own identity.

For Los Choneros, the presidential candidate Villavicencio, before he died. Weeks before his murder, the journalist and politician had denounced the threats from José Adolfo Macías Villama, alias ‘Fito’, leader of the band. Los Choneros is an Ecuadorian gang linked to drug trafficking and with a close relationship with the Mexican Sinaloa cartel. “A Manabí leader was visited by several emissaries of alias ‘Fito’ to tell him that if I keep mentioning the name ‘Fito’ and Los Choneros, they are going to break me“Villavicencio said days before he was assassinated. “My decision was to continue with the electoral campaign and yesterday another threat occurred, two threats, from a telephone whose code is domiciled in Indonesia and which has the profile picture of ‘Fito’,” he added then, according to the local press.

It is believed that the founder of this band was Jorge Busmarck Veliz Spain, alias ‘Lieutenant Spain’, born in little Chone, ‘the city of blossoming orange trees’, who started out as a small drug dealer in the area. In not a long time, ‘Lieutenant Spain’ and the first ‘choneros’ were already dedicating themselves full time to the robbery, extortion, kidnapping and assassination, as explained from ‘Insight Crime’. In the early 2000s, Los Choneros were not even ten kids, between the ages of 18 and 30, but they had already taken control of the drug trafficking route in the province of Manabí, from where the drug was sent to Mexico and United States, mainly, but also to Europe.

In 2005, Los Choneros embarked on a war with the Cheesemakers, another gang in the area, led by Carlos Cedeño Vera and which had figures such as ‘Pichincha’ in its ranks, a woman sentenced to 35 years in prison for several murders who escaped from jail. The objective of Los Queseros was to eliminate their competitors, but the conflict began with the Murder of the wife of ‘Lieutenant Spain’ in an attack in which his daughter was also injured. The rivalry between these two groups caused the death of the leader of Los Choneros in 2007, passing the baton of the drug trafficking group to Jorge Luis Zambrano González, alias ‘Rasquiña’.

The first arrest of ‘Rasquiña’ it took place when he was 26 years old, but he did not spend even a year in jail, according to the local press. He did enter later, after chaining several sentences, including for the murder of Jairon Carreño Mendoza, shot to death in front of his family. ‘Rasquiña’ was released from prison in 2020 after his sentence was reduced, but months after his release, he was shot dead, after almost 15 years as leader of Los Choneros. After his death, it was the turn of ‘Fito’, whom Villavicencio has pointed out directly due to his threats. Right hand of ‘Rasquiña’, ‘Fito’ is serving a 34-year sentence in a country jail.

Villavicencio pointed out, before his murder, that receiving threats from the Ecuadorian drug trafficker confirmed that “indeed” his electoral proposal “seriously affects these criminal structures.” “And here I am, showing my face. I am not afraid of them. Twenty years I have gambled in this country against these criminal structures and I reiterate: I’m not afraid of them.”