To understand why security in Ecuador has been blown up, we must go back to the end of the era of the iron fist with the former president’s criminal gangs. Rafael Correa (2007.2017) and their subsequent alliance with the mexican cartels from Sinaloa and Jalisco. Also the Colombian mafias and even the Balkans. The senior analyst for Latin America at ‘Cidob’, Anna Ayusodeepens: “”That is where a turning point occurs and where they become more violent and bet more on confrontational politics.”

The White House revealed that a third of the cocaine Produced in Colombia in 2019, it was directed to Ecuador, specifically to the port of Guayaquil. To send it from there to North America and Europe.

With the country’s economy collapsed after the pandemic, bands like the Choneros, the Lobos and the Tiguerones multiply their criminal activities. Eduardo Saldañaco-director of ‘The World Order’ links it to the death of the leader of the Choneros and the outbreak of the war between mafias: “that unleashed a war between gangs in 2020 for power and drug trafficking routes.”

Violent deaths have spiked in the streets. 2023 has beaten the murder record, with nearly 7,900 violent deaths, most of them unsolved. And the prisons are now command centers of the big bosses. From there they would have ordered the execution of the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio in August 2023. Anna Ayuso, from Cidob, argues: “there is a problem of impunity and impunity makes the gangs feel that they can do whatever they want.”

In the last hours, both Adolfo Macías, alias Fitoleader of the Choneros, like his great rival, Fabricio Colón Pico, alias Captain Peak, from Los Lobos, have escaped with the connivance of their jailers, they say from Ecuador. They have unleashed the current crisis, in a clear challenge to seize economic, social and even political power. Daniel NoboaEcuadorian president, has ordered their capture with the idea of ​​replicating the macroprisons of Bukele in El Salvador.