Behind Ecuador's Gang TV Takeover: Prison Kings, Megabusts and Daytime Executions
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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. It's around 2 p.m. on Tuesday, January 9th this year at the headquarters of state news TV station TC near the airport of Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city.

Presenters are given a live broadcast to the El Noticiero show when several men, their faces covered with masks, balaclavas and baseball caps storm the studio floor, pushing, kicking and punching staff to the ground and waving an array of weapons, pistols, shotguns, machine guns, grenades and dynamite in their faces. One pokes the barrel of a 12 gauge into the neck of a presenter and forces him onto the ground.

"Don't shoot!" somebody pleads. Then the signal cuts. Moments later, messaging apps are flooded with desperate pleas from those trapped in the building. "They want to kill a lot of us," one writes. "Help us!" State cops are soon on the scene, surrounding TC's offices and raiding it, arresting 13 men and confiscating their guns and explosives. Police commander Cesar Zapata later says that he thinks he just witnessed a terror attack, but it's only the beginning.

The day previous, Ecuador's most infamous Laco leader, José Adolfo Macías Villamar, a.k.a. Fito, head of the Los Chaneros cartel and allied with Mexico's Sinaloans, had escaped from Guayaquil's La Roca prison, unleashing pandemonium.

Just years ago, in this small ocean-side nation of 18 million people, it was a Latin American success story. But in recent years, as local and foreign gangs have joined hands, it has become one of the world's principal drug transshipment points, with kingpins as far-fetched as Albania employing its able and unhinged street crooks. Now, with Fito's escape sparking a tide of violence the likes of which Ecuador has never seen, all bets are off.

Prisoners take guards, hostages and storm hotels, hospitals, universities and administrative buildings. Murders are posted online, as are scenes of gangsters gleefully brandishing machetes at police officers. Disinformation roars across social media and TC's office of course is stormed live on air. Alina Manrique, TC's head of news, had herself been held at gunpoint during the raid

I'm still in shock, she told The Guardian newspaper. Everything has collapsed. All I know is that it's time to leave this country and go very far away. The nation's president, 36-year-old Daniel Namboa, declares a 60-day state of emergency and designates 20 drug trafficking groups as terror organizations.

He vows to take back control of Ecuador's prisons, for decades a petri dish for crime, and where, since 2021, brutal riots have claimed the lives of 420 inmates. Writes a magazine of one such brutal attack, quote, inmates alleged to be snitches were tortured, mutilated and burned alive.

However, it's possible that the total number of deaths was much higher since an accurate number of the prison population was not kept and, in the carnage, bodies were dismembered or totally incinerated. These supposed narco-terrorist groups tried to threaten us and believed that we would give in to their demands, says President de Boer just after the TC attack.

No sooner has he spoken that it's confirmed a second drug lord. Fabrizio Colon, leader of the Los Lobos crew that's been warring with Los Llaneros, has escaped from a separate facility in the interior city of Rio Bamba. Things in Ecuador are about to get a lot, lot worse. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Underworld Podcast

Hello and welcome to the show where each week two esteemed reporters dig in to a tale of crime and despair from a different corner of the world. I'm Sean Williams in Wellington, New Zealand and I'm joined as ever by the intrepid, nocturnal Danny Gold in New York City.

uh has your nightlife as your nightlife has your night living caused a breakdown yet um or maybe we can get you on human on a rogan to like talk about it and sell some good old bovine supplements yeah i don't think the listeners know what you're talking about so i'll explain real quick i was just uh trying out just staying up all night and working until the early hours of uh of the morning because i felt it made me more productive but it turns out uh it leads to a complete and utter breakdown so um

It worked out great until it didn't. And now I'm mostly back to normal. And actually, I'm going to join you today because my kid is sick and I have to look after him all day and work all night. And we're recording this at 6 a.m. So this is cool. So I'll come back with some tips as well. Maybe we can do a New York Times piece. I don't know.

Anyway, before we crack on some housekeeping, if you're not signed up to all the socials, please do that so I can show my mom and dad how popular their little boy is when they come out and visit in a few weeks. We've got interviews going up on the Patreon, of course, and there are a couple of editions now of this new weekly news roundup that's taking the world by storm. Some cool guys doing that. We work hard and all you've got to do is press some lousy little button, guys. Please, please do it. Yeah, that's patreon.com slash theintherworldpodcast.com.

or you can sign up on Spotify or iTunes. And what Sean means is that every week, um, he's mostly doing a international crime roundup news brief. That's, you know, 10 or 15 minutes, but that's, that's on the patron. In addition to interviews that we're going to be having with some authors, uh,

I had books that came out recently. Azam Ahmed won about that woman in Mexico who I think her daughter was taken by the cartels or killed, and she tracked a bunch of cartel members down. There's a couple others I think that we'll have coming up that are going to be, I think, interesting.

up everyone's alley so definitely keep an eye out for that and uh you know we're also we'll also do barter system you know goods and services that we want we'll do ads for you let's make it happen yeah i'm meeting up with a guy who's the head of one of the um one of the biker gangs out here soon so uh we'll do a nice little recording of that with like coffee cups clinking and beer glasses and stuff it would sound like i'm doing proper journalism uh and then i'm meeting a guy works out in vietnam helping people who are trafficked out there it's really interesting stuff but um

Anyway, Ecuador, the stuff you'll want to know about. Let's start with the why. Because I think as much as the media is doing a great job documenting all the crazy stuff that's going on now, and it definitely, definitely is a war. I think a lot of people are talking about it as a war and you're going to hear how bad it is.

I'm not really seeing a huge amount piecing together all the bits of the puzzle, which, besides posting on Twitter and failing to hold down steady relationships, is our job. So, it might not come as a surprise that Ecuador's own path to misery begins in the early 70s, when its own lawmakers hitch a ride on America's war on drugs by minting a raft of very punitive legislation.

I just want to point out, too, that instead of doing some quick hit info thing, like right on the day this sort of stuff happens, Sean took a few weeks, put something together that I think is really comprehensive and insightful so people can learn about what is actually going on in Ecuador instead of just a really brief article about these gangs, getting the background, the politics of it all. So I think, hopefully...

The next 38 minutes could be really good. It could be utter crap. I haven't read it yet, but we'll see what happens. I mean, like, yeah, there's kind of a flavor of the month thing with big gang stories, right? Just like pops up somewhere. There's like a whack-a-mole. This week it's Haiti. Next week it's Ecuador. So, yeah, it's good to like sink your teeth into what really goes on behind the scenes.

Yeah, and these laws that pop up in the 1970s and onwards, they don't really make a lot of sense. So according to the paper by the Transnational Institute of

quote, while Ecuador has become an important transit country for illicit drugs, precursor chemicals and for money laundering, the illicit drug trade has not been perceived as a major threat to the country's national security. However, the paper adds, Ecuador has one of the most draconian drug laws in Latin America.

Of particular concern is the country's Law 108, aka the Law on Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which was brought in in 1991 under extreme international pressure. Says the paper, quote,

This resulted in major prison overcrowding and a worsening of prison conditions. And Quito, I'm using that as the capital, the government, gives some amnesty to small-time drug couriers in 2008. But by then, the diet has already been well, well cast. You know, not to be a supporter of draconian drug laws here because I don't support them. But if Ecuador only really jumped off like in the last few years, what is it, last five years or so?

Like maybe what they were doing was working, right? Because their neighbors were all engulfed in incredibly vicious and violent drug violence and, you know, narco-terrorism essentially. And compared to the rest of Latin America, it seems like they were doing pretty well until what, the last half a decade? Yeah.

It seems like what's happening now is a bit of a death by a thousand cuts kind of thing, or like a pressure cooker or some other overall allegory that I could use. But essentially, it was working for a long time, and then all these things kind of bubbled up to the surface so badly that then suddenly it wasn't. And there are all kinds of different reasons for this, right? I mean, in the year 2000, fearing the devaluation of its own currency, the Sucre, which is an awesome name, give me some sugar, amigo,

Ecuador ties its rates to the dollar or dollarizes the economy. So this isn't necessarily a bad idea, nor is it something that many of the media reports I've seen have picked up. I mean, high for inflation is a problem all around Latin America in the early 2000s. Seems like a good idea. But what it also does is make Ecuador a great place to wash dirty money. What with it being so easy to work in dollars and so on.

Legitimate businesses up and down the country start making a tidy side hustle in hiding narco cash. So lucrative is this business that a lot of senior figures and politicians get involved too. And that is obviously a problem because now Ecuador's officials, military leaders, business honchos, they're all viable. You know who else is viable, Sean? Us here at the Underworld Podcast.

Boeing, Exxon, Neom, Lockheed Martin. That's the underworldpodcast at gmail.com. Hit us up for all your advertising needs. Yeah, why are we getting hit up for bump stock sales when we could just be getting hit up for the actual guns themselves? I did say no to that. I felt a little off. Yeah, but if Sig Sawyer wants to give us a few billion, then yeah, fine. I'm all over it.

Anyway, all the time that this is going on in the outside, in Ecuador, inside the country's prisons, things are really, really fracturing and getting more and more febrile. You know, I feel like you use that word in every other episode, and I still refuse to learn what it means. And I have a great vocabulary, so I think you're out on a limb here. The second I wrote that down in the script, I knew you were going to flag it up. I couldn't wait for you to say that.

I'm not going to list all the gangs that are going to spring out of this period because there's one huffy little dickhead said in a bad review. There were just too many damn names on this podcast. Oh, you know, I read that review. Like, fuck that guy. You write a new 6,000 word episode every other week while doing your normal job and then complain it doesn't have like a Shakespearean structured piece of garbage.

Yeah, anyway, the two main outfits, right, in Ecuador are Los Lobos, the Wolves, and Los Chorneros, which, as the name suggests, began in the small town of Chorne. They begin as small fry pushers, and their first leader is the very oddly named Jorge Bismarck Vélez España. That is really weird. But as befalls most Latin cartels, jefes are not his German namesake. The Chorneros splinter under Bismarck.

Honestly, I was so badly trying to chew on that. And I've put some detailed information in the reading list on the Trinidad wars that break out in the late 90s and early 2000s. If anyone speaks Spanish, that's me virtue signaling. But eventually the group are going to end up in the hands of a guy born 44 years ago today in the nearby coastal town of Manta. That is Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, better known by his nickname of Vito.

More on him, of course, soon. But now, I'm rattling all the way up to 2018. The Lobos and Choneros are well established as Ecuador's biggest criminal organizations. But the nation itself, as you pointed out, has avoided the bloodshed of its neighbors, especially the coca-producing giants of Colombia and Peru that it's sandwiched squarely between.

But that year, 2018, violence begins to rise. And that's when local gangs fight for supremacy over a trade that's booming thanks to rising demand in the US and Europe and increased coca leaf production in the Andes.

Killings are confined at first, behind bars, but as the bloodshed grows and authorities are either helpless to stop it or, increasingly, complicit, the prisons go from turf wars to nerve centres for ever-growing narco-empires.

Ecuador's prison population goes from 11,000 in 2009 to almost 40,000 a decade later. So that's going to be a problem. At the same time, Ecuador's authorities' eyes are taken off the ball by a series of bomb blasts orchestrated by the FARC, Colombia's left-wing rebel group, which is also involved in coca production, of course, on the Colombia-Ecuador border. So you see how this thing's just...

crewing and building and building it's really going to spill over soon and this combination of a growing trade prison chaos and these punitive laws that are not really well enforced gives outsiders the chance to sink their teeth into Ecuador the Sinaloa cartel and CJNG they come down from Mexico while and you'll like this Danny gangsters from Europe's Balkan region who locals simply call the quote Albanians they also enter the fray

Yeah, sounds like they could write for this podcast. But is it actually Albanians? Or are we talking Serbs, Bosnians, or just people from that part of Europe? Yeah, it's the Balkan. It's your kind of mega cartel. It's kind of everyone from everywhere. But they're a bit Balkan, therefore they're Albanian, which is, yeah, I'll go for that. I like that. Guayaquil, which is a large port and Ecuador's biggest city, home to over 3.5 million people. Well, that's the key.

Each month, 300,000 containers depart from Guayaquil and only 20% are searched. Gang wars soon spill onto the streets and then you get the usual horrors of Latin American narco terror. Bodies hanging from road bridges, children recruited or gunned down in their schools. It is really tragic, nasty stuff. A Guayaquil community leader tells the New York Times last July that kids as young as 13 are conscripted into the gangs.

They are threatened, this person says. You don't want to join? We will kill your family. I mean, you know El Salvador's gang situation way more than I do, but a lot of this sounds like MS-13 and Barrio de Siocho war. I mean, the drug money trickling down and ballooning the size of the outfits, turning them onto street terror like extortion, rape, murder.

I feel like it's a little different, right? Drug money was never that big a moneymaker for those gangs for a long time. Extortion was always the main earner. They weren't seen as reliable enough to sort of work with the cartels in terms of transpo and things like that. There were some people that did, but it was separate. I think now it's more of someone completely different, but also at the same time, now they basically are destroyed.

Like, you know, Kelly just completely, but that's a topic for another conversation. Well, it all kind of, it all kind of bleeds into a similar story because that sounds more like what's going on in Belize where a couple of chosen sort of select few rows above the street crime and they were happy just to keep it swilling around below them if they could get their slice of the narco pie. But yeah,

Yeah, it's really interesting how each of these countries kind of has its own story overlaid. I mean, you know, everyone's getting done by the Mexicans, basically. But add to all of this in Ecuador, a bump in poverty caused by the pandemic, and you've got desperation, violence, and a booming foreign trade at the top.

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Ecuador's leaders know only one way to deal with this, and it's the same spiraling tough-on-crime approach that's ballooned violence across South America at this time. Writes Responsible Statecraft, quote, these include Felipe Calderon in Mexico, Álvaro Uribe on Colombia, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Honestly, Uribe, Uribe, I hate that name.

All of them expanded police and military powers against drug gangs while facing a surge in violence, only to see that violence and insecurity increase as a result of their policies. Yeah, I mean, for the record, Responsible Statecraft is a garbage publication run by a garbage think tank. But separate from that...

I think that's a mostly accurate statement, right? Or has been, except you, like I said, you can't really argue with the fact that what we've seen is the, yeah. And El Salvador is the complete opposite of that, right? Um, where they've done that and it's been remarkably successful for now. Again, I'm not endorsing what he's done. And obviously there's been a, uh, just a rash of human rights violations, uh,

But you can't argue with the fact that it is working in El Salvador. His popularity is through the roof, not just there, but in...

you know, in, in, in Latin America in general. Uh, we, we did do an interview with, uh, with Neil Brandvold on the Patreon, I think maybe six months ago, who is a reporter I've worked with down there who, who left the country. And he really talked about how, um, you know, the, the, the negative aspects of that as well, but it's not as black and white as I think we, we'd like to see it. And, um, yeah, yeah. It's, it's one of those conversations that, that, you know, I don't want to dwell on it, but like we, we,

We're quick to, I think, point out the human rights violations and the sort of – you could even say brutality that has been used to crack down on the gangs in El Salvador. But the people of El Salvador who have lived under those gangs, they had lived under those gangs for decades and were sick and tired of it. And –

support whatever i'm not going to get into into the morality debate or whatever it is but it's it's a complicated situation yeah i think like actually to go a bit political nerdy he's like lumped in with a bunch of populists but he's not really a populist boukele i don't see him as a populist because populism is a absence of policy and it's like a negative campaigning approach but he

He had a problem and he's solving it in a way that people don't agree with in many cases, but that's not really the same as...

someone in you know like an orban or whatever like it's a completely different thing and i don't i think that the wet like western publications in a lot of cases get bukele wrong stop getting bukele wrong uh anyway now back to the key players in ecuador for years one man stands above all others in ecuador's underworld and it's not bismarck which is a shame

Washington Prado Alaba begins life in the narco business as a so-called lanchero, piloting drug boats on runs to Central America and Mexico. By around 2012-2013, he's moved up the supply chain one link at a time, so he's buying gear from Colombia and coordinating the entire transport into Guatemala, where his own buyers, you can guess where they're from, are waiting for him.

As the years pass, Alaba gets the nickname Gerald or Heland, which is funnier in English. I'm going to call him Gerald. And some call him Ecuador's Pablo Escobar, which is your name. But, you know, we'll probably put it in the show title for clicks. And he becomes notorious for killing a number of high level prosecutors and politicians who try to get in his way.

He's sending three to four boats to Central America each week, which might not sound a lot, but when you can stuff them full of product, it is. And he mirrors the empire building bent of his Mexican clients by turning his home state of Manabe into a safe house for his family and cash.

Oddly enough, though, it's precisely this safe house and not the multiple high-level assassinations that causes downfall. In 2016, Gerald is having a safe build in his home when several million US dollars go missing, and he pins it on one of the construction workers and, of course, kills him.

This murder, among all of them, brings law enforcement down on the kingpin, and he's swept up in a 2017 police operation called Sol Naciente, or Rising Sun, which is pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, that's got to be a fascinating backstory, right? Like, he kills all these government and law enforcement officials, high up people, but it's just some, like, construction worker, like, building something in his house or whatever it is that brings him down? Yeah, it's mad. I get the sense from reading the reports that

It was their chance to have like an easy moral win. You know, they were like, OK, so this guy is like a poor construction worker and he's been killed for nothing. So we're going to like wrap this whole operation up in that killing and make that the headline, which is, you know, good. Anyway, Harold, Harold, Harold, Gerald, then actually tries to join the FARC.

But he's extradited to the US in 2018, where authorities accuse him of trafficking at least 250 tons of product into the US. So 2018, remember that date? That was where things were starting to kick off. And this is when Gerald is out of the picture. And that leaves room for the Lobos and Choneros to make their moves. And of course, that's just as the Mexicans and Albanians or Yugoslavians or whoever they are, are moving into Ecuador and making their own.

Now, Fito, the head of the Choneros. He's actually already behind bars by this point, and he's been so since 2011, where he's serving a 34-year sentence for a criminal record including robbery, murder, manslaughter, illicit association, organised crime, possession of weapons, attack on life, and crime against property. For what it's worth, his mother, Marisol, she still thinks he's a very good boy. Quote,

He's been investigated for everything. They accuse him of selling drugs, stealing cars, and even of stealing chickens.

For everything that happens in Manta, they want to hold him responsible. Yes, Marisol, because he's done it. Anyway, in 2013, as the Choneros second in command at the time, Fito, who, by the way, often has long wavy hair and a fat protruding belly, which I can identify with, actually escapes from the maximum security La Roca prison. And he spends 10 months on the run before police track him down.

But he's not really punished for it. He lives in total luxury and he doesn't hide it. Flaunting pics and videos of knees-ups behind bars on social media, writes the AP, quote, there are murals with Fito's image inside prisons. During his stay in the La Regionar prison, that's near Guayaquil, by the way, he throws parties and has access to forbidden items including weapons, appliances, liquor, fighting cocks and jewellery, among other items.

A framed painting shows him in robes since he graduated as a lawyer in prison. His bathroom was decorated with ceramics.

I mean, that last sentence, that's just the icing on the cake, right? He has everything, including ceramics, in his prison bathroom. I hope he has that nice black and white tiling that every single hipster has. Anyway, in December 2020, the Choneros leader, that's Jose Luis Zambrano, a.k.a. Rasquinha, he dies, leaving Fito and another guy in charge. But that dude dies shortly afterwards, which is pretty sus, and Fito is left as the sole chief.

Vito then launches a war on smaller gangs that had formerly been allies, which is partly to blame for the incredible rise in prison murders and riots at the time. And all of this coincides with the COVID-19 pandemic, which hits Ecuador and especially Guayaquil as badly as anywhere on Earth. Writes the crisis group, quote,

As the virus rampaged through the city in March and April 2020, the world saw horrifying images of corpses in makeshift shrouds kept in homes or left on the streets as the surge of deaths overwhelmed the local health system, emergency phone lines and funeral parlours. Deluged by the sheer number of dead, the national government brought in a businessman to handle the disposal of bodies.

All of this means more chaos, more poverty and more desperation for young Ecuadorians. Of course, a weaker state as well, and it's the perfect tinderbox for drug cartels to snatch power.

This, and the increased use of the Chineros, Lobos and other smaller gangs to do the Mexican cartel's bidding, results in probably one of the world's most beautiful drug routes, and that's going straight through the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Galapagos Islands, beloved by Charles Darwin, home to giant tortoises and marine iguanas found nowhere else in the world, where volcanic lava still flows and smoke billows from the edge of the ocean.

The Washington Post, it published a great feature on one of the remotest Galapagos Islands, Isabela, where in 2021, a local airport employee spot something very weird. Quote, the whir of a small airplane touching down unannounced on the runway. Carries on. Panicked, he jumped on his motorbike and rushed to the police station. But by the time the authorities reached the scene, the Cessna Conquest 2 had been abandoned.

Whoever had flown it had fled, leaving behind eight fuel containers, five of them full. On Isabella, the lone airport employee feared the cartels had arrived. The Cessna was towed to the side of the runway and left there. One morning, two months later, the employee pulled up to the airport to begin work and was treated to another surprise. I went to wash my face to see if it was true what I saw, he would tell authorities. The ghost plane was gone.

Oh man, that's dark. We can't let them do those big ass turtles like they did rhinos, man. We need like an international force just to keep those turtles safe.

That would be a great fundraising campaign. Aren't those giant tortoises like a million years old as well? Yeah, dude, we got to protect those tortoises. Yeah, they've had a good life though, come on. In 2021, Ecuadorian authorities ramp up patrols and they seize a record 176 tons of snow. So I'm using your words now.

up almost double from the previous year. The state itself has even taken to giving fishermen subsidies to protect them from the temptation of narcos, but it's a losing battle. Says one pescador to the WAPO, quote, I've been offered 6,000 to 7,000 US dollars for a trip. Lots of people have become millionaires off of this. I mean...

Is that millionaire money? I don't know. Ecuador's Navy says that folks smuggling gas to fuel these routes can earn up to 30 grand a job. The narcos call it the, quote, desert route. Maybe if you're doing fuel runs. Yeah, but come on, mate. If you're doing the fish, no. Add to this feature by the WAPO, really hitting the nail on the head, quote, Ecuador is responsible for monitoring more than 490,000 square miles of ocean, five times the country's land area.

The more than 24,000 boats registered for artisanal fishing embarked from more than 120 ports and many more beaches that are mostly unwatched by authorities. The U.S. presence on this coastline is minimal. In 2009, leftist then-President Rafael Correa ousted U.S. forces from a military base in the port city of Manta.

Great job, Kami. Well done. Yeah, yeah. And remember Manta? Yeah, that is Vito's hometown. So that is also a tiny bit sus. And this situation on the Galapagos is getting worse. Cops are on the cartel's payroll. Hermit local communities won't speak out. And the shipments, they're just going up and up. Says one local woman simply, little by little, the drugs are taking over the island and there is no help.

Now we're really accelerating towards today's war. Between 2016 and 2022, Ecuador's homicide rate jumps almost 500% to around 22 murders per 100,000. Now it's 26. That puts it well above Mexico and close to Honduras, which is not a position you want to be.

High-level assassinations ramp up in 2022 as well. That May, public prosecutor Luis Marina Delgado is shot to death in her car by Colombian and Venezuelan hitmen. A couple months later, a huge explosion rocks Guayaquil, killing five people and wounding another 26. Organized crime mercenaries who have long drugged the economy now attack with explosives, tweets Interior Minister Patricio Carillo.

Gaya Kilmer, Cynthia Viteri, pens an open letter to President Lasso. That's not Ted Lasso. That's a different Lasso. After the explosion, quote, criminal gangs have become a government within a government in Ecuador. We have witnessed people hanging from bridges, murders on motorcycles, rapes at shopping centers and on school buses.

What else do you want us to do to defend ourselves? A president is the protector of his people, but so far we've not seen a single safe step to combat crime. Funny thing there, she actually did at Ted Lasso the TV show, so President Lasso didn't hear her at all. And the following summer, Fernando Villavicencio, a former journalist and outspoken critic of the drug trade, is on the campaign trail, hoping to become Ecuador's next president.

This guy is just about the definition of a fearless investigative reporter. He's already fled Ecuador once in 2014 to avoid a jail term for allegedly defaming autocratic former president Rafael Correa, the dirty commie who, as I mentioned earlier, has only served to worsen the narco problem. Throughout his own campaign, Villavicencio says he's receiving death threats from the Sinaloa cartel and their pals the Choneros.

and that high-ranking military officials are in on the drug game, something the US agrees with across several diplomatic cables back to Washington. But Bia Vicente is made of tough stuff. He tells supporters at one rally he would rather wear a, quote, sweaty shirt than a bulletproof vest, adding, quote, I don't need it. I'm not afraid. I'm brave like you. Let them come. Here I am. Dude, those Latin American, like, narco journos, they are...

They're just something else. Just dedicate to the cause like no others. Incredibly brave, but also like probably you should probably wear a vest. I'm just saying, you know, wear a vest. Yeah, just wear a vest. If not, you know, for your dating apps and stuff. But yeah, you should do that. Anyway, here they come.

On August 9th, Villavicencio is leaving a campaign rally in the capital city of Quito and he's climbing into his SUV when a gunman opens fire, hitting Villavicencio in the head three times, killing him instantly. Villavicencio's guards return fire, injuring the shooter, who later dies in custody. But authorities soon arrest six men who, tellingly, are all Colombian.

The interior minister calls the slaying a, quote, political crime of a terrorist nature. Possibly just as sinister, in early October, local media reports that all six Colombians have been murdered in prison in Guayaquil. I mean, this is beginning to look a lot like the Escobar-led narco-terror years that rocked Colombia a couple decades before. And finally, after this killing, Ecuador's top prosecutor acts.

On December 14, 2023, Attorney General Diana Salazar-Mendez launches Caso Mesostasis, filing charges against several public officials suspected of collusion in the drug trade. Overall, the state carries out 97 raids and arrests 28 suspects and fast-tracks their court appearances.

These folks include police accused of delivering weapons to prison and the former director of the prison authority himself, on whose phone cops find call logs and text chats from high-level traffickers.

Salazar hails caso mesostasis as a success saying it shows how far inside Ecuador's systems the narcos have been able to reach. But she warns of a possible quote escalation in violence in the coming days and tells the president to be on high alert. Police make ever bigger drug busts but they only serve to highlight how out of control things have become.

Then, on January 9th this year, all hell breaks loose. Gangs run riot across the country, the gunmen storm TC Televisión and Ecuador is suddenly on a war footing. Fito and Fabrizio Colón, aka the Savage and Head of the Lobos, go on the run. Colón, by the way, is linked to Bia Vicencio's death and he's allegedly sent threats to Salazar herself.

The boy is bad news. On January 17th this year, Cesar Suarez, the public prosecutor leading the investigation into the TC raid, is shot and killed in broad daylight in Guayaquil. Oh man, I had no idea just a week later. It's just insane. Yeah, it's really, really bad. Gangsters take hundreds of prison guards hostage. One is shot dead and broadcast direct to social media. But disinformation at the same time spreads like wildfire. It's like...

real warfare. On January 20, Argentina arrests and deports Fito's wife, three kids, nephew, nanny and friend who had fled south two weeks before his prison break. They are currently being held in a military complex in Guayaquil.

The Argentine security minister praises the move, adding to reporters that, quote, we are proud that Argentina was a hostile territory for a group of drug dealers who could have come to settle here. Mr. Fito had a sentence of 38 years and he escaped, leaving a trail of blood and death in Ecuador.

I mean, yeah, well done, Argentina. But what about those other mass murderers? I mean, Eichmann, Pavlovich, Mengele. You're not so hot on the Nazis, are you? I mean, you know, we've got new Argentina now. The guy's got wacky hair. He wears a leather jacket. Let's see what he gets up to. Yeah.

God, that guy. Okay, anyway, on Jan 21st this year, government ministers from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru meet in Lima, announcing they will set up a cross-border network to combat international drug crime. Quote, no country is safe if a neighbor suffers the insane attacks of these groups. This problem must be addressed forcefully, says the Peruvian PM.

On Jan 22nd, cops arrest 68 men who attempt to take over a hospital in Ecuador's southwest. That same day, cops make an unbelievable bust on a pig farm in a coastal town 155 miles from Quito. Wrights El Pais quote, in 733 jukebags, 22 tons of cocaine hydrochloride was stored.

perfectly packaged in the shape of a brick and labeled with the airlines they were destined to go to. Iberia, KLM, Qatar, AB, Jet 2. There are six different logos that make it clear what the destinations were, says the police commander. Yeah, I mean, when you first hear like unbelievable boss on a pig farm, my imagination went to dark places. So that's a bit of a relief, but also like,

That's just a hilarious way of keeping track of where your bricks are going. You know, just labeling the airline. It's just so stupid. They just don't care, you know? Yeah, I mean, this bust, right, this is unbelievable. A dozen soldiers dig four meters underground for four hours to make the discovery. Okay, four hours work, guys. It's not that big a deal.

Anyway, when they do, this is truly shocking. Continues El Pais, quote, the soldiers' search also took them to a sewer duct which led to an underground labyrinth where another 12 tonnes of cocaine hydrochloride were located.

The discovery reinforces the investigation of the army, which believes that Ecuador is not only a transit country for drugs, but also home to drug processing laboratories. The soldiers also discovered 12 rifles and more than 5,000 pieces of ammunition stashed in the property. This stuff has an estimated street value of $1.1 billion. I mean, apologies for the Dr. Evil voice there, but holy moly, that is a lot of snow.

Ecuador is now the nation with the third highest number of cocaine seizures in the world. On January 24, cops make another coup when they capture a leader of a FARC-affiliated group called El Gringo. This is a group which operates between Colombia and Ecuador. El Gringo is thought to be behind bomb attacks in 2018 and the kidnapping murder of three Ecuadorian journalists. He's now being extradited back to Colombia.

Ecuador's President Naboa, who is younger than me and you, which is very depressing, is calling these bus proof that his state of emergency is working. Quote, there are fewer violent deaths. There is more tranquility. People feel safer and no longer hesitate to denounce extortionists. I mean, it sounds like he is getting after it now. You know, he's doing something right. That can't be a bad thing.

But it's a bit hasty to say that it's winning, especially when the war continues to broil and both Cologne and Vito have evaded recapture so far. I mean, when this goes out, maybe they've been captured. I'm sorry about that, guys. Anyway, some say Vito has actually already made it to Argentina.

And of course, we will have more on this as it develops, including in that brilliant news roundup stash house. Did I mention to subscribe, like, all that stuff that you do on the internet? Anyway, yeah, it's a terrifying situation going down in Ecuador, and it remains to be seen whether the state can bring it back under some form of control, but...

Yeah, it really hasn't done so for years. And let's see what happens. Dude, that was well done. You know, I think we really gave people a good background on what's going on. For more, of course, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast or sign up on Spotify on our banner or on iTunes for bonus episodes or just to support us. You don't have to listen to bonuses. Just like just do it to support us. YouTube, whatever. Until next week. Music

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