The Underworld Podcast - Behind Ecuador's Gang TV Takeover: Prison Kings, Megabusts and Daytime Executions

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

This month armed men stormed an Ecuadorean TV station, shocking the world and plunging the nation into gang hell. Prosecutors have been assassinated and gangs are looting offices, universities and even hospitals, as martial law takes hold. It might seem like Ecuador has gone from Latin American idyll to narco-state overnight. The truth, though, is that it’s been bubbling under the surface for half a century. We dig into the laws, routes, rebels and cowboys that have gotten us here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's around 2pm on Tuesday, January 9th this year at the headquarters of State News TV station, T.C. Near the airport of Gaiat-Kill, Ecuador's largest city. presenters are giving a live broadcast to the El Noticeiro show when several men, their faces covered with masks, balaclavas and baseball caps, stormed 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 tracks in the building. They want to kill a lot of us, one writes. Help us. State cops are soon on the scene, surrounding T.C.'s offices and raiding it,

arresting 13 men and confiscating their guns and explosives. Police commander Cesar Sepata later says that he thinks he just witnessed the terror attack. But it's only the beginning. The day previous, Ecuador's most infamous Laco leader, Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, aka Fito, head of the Los Cheneros cartel and allied with Mexico's Senaloans, had escaped from Gaia Kills La Rocca 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 of 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 gas, 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 T.C.'s office, of course, is stormed live on air. Alina Manrique, T.C.'s head of news, had herself been held at gunpoint during the raid. I was 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 at 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 believe that we would give in to their demands, says President de Boa, just after the TC attack. No sooner has he spoken that it's confirmed a second drug lord, Fabizio Cologne, leader of the Los Lobos crew that's been warring with Los Genneros, 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. 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. Sean Williams in Wellington, New Zealand, and I'm joined as everybody by the intrepid, nocturnal Danny Gold in New York City. Has your nightlife, has your nightlife, has your night living caused a breakdown yet? Or maybe we can get you on Hubman or 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 trying out, just staying up all night and working until the early hours of the morning because I felt it made me more productive. But, it turns out it leads to a complete and utter breakdown. So 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.

That's something 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, that's the annual podcast. Or you can sign up on Spotify or iTunes, and what Sean means is that every week. 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 Patreon in addition to interviews that we're going to be having with some authors that I've 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. You know, there's a couple others I think that we'll have coming up that are going to be I think up everyone's alley. So definitely keep an eye out for that. And, you know, we're also, we'll also do barter system, you know, goods and services that we'll also do. want, we'll do ads for you. Let's make it happen. Yeah, I'm meeting up with a guy who's ahead 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, uh, 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 hit a ride on America's war on drugs by mincing a raft of very punitive legislation. I just want to point out too that, you know, instead of doing some quick hit info thing, like right on the day this sort of stuff happens, you know, 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, you know, 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 happened. I mean, like, yeah, there's kind of a flavor of a 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. Okay, so according to the paper by the Transnational Institute, 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.

A 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, its focus on enforcement and the presence of US pressure meant that the success of Ecuador's drug policies was measured by how many individuals were in prison on drug charges. This resulted in major prison overcrowding

and a worsening of prison conditions. And keto, I'm using that as the capital, the government, gives some amnesty to small-time drug couriers in 2008, but by then the dire 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 the Latin America, it seems like they were doing pretty well until, what, the last half a decade? Well, 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, like, overall allegory that I could use. But essentially, like, 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 were 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 awesome name, give me some sugar, amigo. Ecuador tires 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 would 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, Neum, Lockheed Martin, That's The Underworld Podcast 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 like for the actual guns themselves? I did. I did say no to that. I felt a little, that felt a little off, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, but like if if kind of Sig Sawyer wants to, 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 fibroil. 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 just, 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. I'm not going to list all the gangs that are going to spring out of this period because

as 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 Choneros, which is 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 Velis, Espagna. That is really weird.

But as before's most Latin cartels, Heffes, and not his German namesake, the Cherneros splinter under Bismarck. Honestly, I was so badly trying to shoehorn that in. I've put some detailed information in the reading list on the Cheneros 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 Massias Biamar, better known by his nickname of Fito. 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 implicit,

the prisons go from turf wars to nerve centres for ever growing nigh-nors. Maco 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. 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 Columbia-Equador 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 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, you know, Serbs, Bosnians or just people from that part of Europe? Yeah, it's the Balkan. It's your kind of mega cartel, you know, 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.

Gai Akil, 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 Gai'akil 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 gun down in their schools. It is really tragic, nasty stuff. A Gai'a Kiel 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 rate 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, you know, work with the cartels in terms of transpos and things like that. There were some people that did, but it was separate. I think now it's more to 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 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, 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. of murder. Hi, I'm Karina B. B. Meesterfer, and every single day on Morning Cup of Murder, I bring you a real, chilling, true crime story connected to that exact day in history. From Killer Cannibal Brothers to the Boy Scout who was obsessed with the occult, and the strange story of the bloody hammer in the frozen cabin. These aren't the cases you've heard a hundred times. They're the ones that make you stop and think, how have I never heard this before? With over 2,500 episodes and a brand new story each and every single day, Morning Cup of Murder becomes part of your routine fast.

If you like your coffee hot but your bones chilled, then sit back and start your day with a Morning Cup of Murder. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. Ecuador's leaders know only one way to deal with this, and it's the same spiraling, tough-on-crime approach there's ballooned violence across South America at this time. Wright's responsible state craft, quote,

these include Felipe Calderon in Mexico, Alibiro, Uribe, keep that in, though, on Colombia, and Jaya 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, like I said, you can't really argue with the fact

that what we've seen is the, yeah, in El Salvador is the complete opposite of that, right? 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 just a rash of human rights violations, but you can't argue with the fact that it is working in El Salvador. His popularity is like through the roof, not just there, but in Latin America in general.

We did do an interview with Neil Brandvold on the Patreon, I think maybe six months ago, who is a reporter I've worked with down there who left the country. And he really talked about how, you know, the negative aspects of that as well. it's not as black and white as I think we we like to see it. And yeah, yeah, it's one of those conversations that, you know, I don't want to dwell on it, but like we were quick to, I think, point out the human rights violations and the sort of, you could even say brutality that, 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, you know, they had lived under those gangs for decades.

and we're sick and tired of it and support whatever. I'm not going to get into the morality debate or whatever it is, but 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, Buceli. I don't see him as a populist, because populism is an absence of policy, and it's like a negative campaign approach.

But he, like, he's 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 think that the Western publications in a lot of cases get Buckele wrong. Stop getting Buckele wrong. 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 Lancero, piloting drugboats 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, and you can guess where they're from, are waiting for him. As the years pass, Alba gets the nickname Gerald, or Helod, which is funnier in English, so I'm going I call him Gerald.

And some call him Ecuador's Pablo Escobar, which, that's your name, but 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 Manabi into a safe house for his family. in cash. Oddly enough though, it's precisely this stave house and not the multiple high-level assassinations that causes downfall. In 2016, Gerald is having a safe bill 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 Nassian. 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, okay, 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, Herald, 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, organized crime, possession of weapons, attack on life, and crime against property. But what it's worth is 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 happens in Manta, they want to hold him responsible.

Yes, Marisol, because he's done it. Anyway, in 2013, it's the Chorneros 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 Rocca 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 picks 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 Guy Akele, by the way, he throws parties and has access to forbidden items including weapons, appliances, liquor, fighting cocks and jewelry, among other items. A frame 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 ice.

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 Sanbrano, aka Raskinia. 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. Fito then launches a war on smaller gangs that had formerly been allies, which is partly to blame for the incredible riots in prison murders and riots at the time.

And all of this coincides with the COVID-19 pandemic, which hits Ecuador and especially Gaia Kiel 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 parlors. 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 Cheneros, Lobos and other smaller gangs to do the Mexican cartels 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 tortoise 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, Isabella,

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?

I don't know. They're like, old. Yeah, dude, we got to protect those tortoes. Yeah, they've had a good life, though. Come on. In 2021, Ecuadorian authorities ramp up patrols, and they seize a record 170. 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 six to seven thousand 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 and really hitting a 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 US 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 Fito's hometown. So that is also a tiny bit suss. And this situation on the Galapagos is getting worse. Cops are on the cartels payroll, hermit local communities won't speak out,

and the shipments are 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. and 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 rocked Gaia Kill, killing five people and wounding another 26. Organised crime mercenaries who have long drugged the economy, now attack with explosives, tweets Interior Minister Patricio Carrillo. Gaia Kilmer, Cynthia Viteri, pens an open letter to President Lassau. That's not Ted Lassau, 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 Lassau 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 Comi, 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 powers of Chorneros, 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 Vicentio is made of tough stuff. He tells supporters at one rally he would rather wear a, quote, sweaty shirt that a bulletproof fest, 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, narcojournos, they are, they're just something else, just dedicated to the cause like no others, incredibly brave, but also. So, 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 dating apps and stuff. But, yeah, you should do that. Anyway, here they come. On August 9th, Via Vesensio is leaving a campaign rally in the capital city of Quito,

and he's climbing into his SUV when a gunman opens fire, hitting Vio Vio Vesensio in the head three times, killing him instantly. Beavisentio'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 Guy Kill. 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 Salasad Mendes launches Castle Mesasasasas, 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 files. 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 Casso-Mestestasis 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 bus, 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 gunman storm T.C. Television, and Ecuador is suddenly on a war footing. Fito and Fabrizio Colon, aka the savage and head of the Lobos, go on the run.

Colombe, by the way, is linked to Villavicencio's death, and he's allegedly sent threats to Salazar herself. The boy is bad news. On January 17th this year, says Eswaris, the public prosecutor leading the investigation into the T.C. raid is shot and killed in broad daylight in Gaia Kiel. 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 wildfires, 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. Suss, they are currently being held in a military complex in Gai Kiel. 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, Mengler, 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 were 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 22, 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 Paiz quote, in 733 jute bags,

22 tons of cocaine hydrochlorae was stored, perfectly packaged in the shape of a brick and labeled with the airlines they were destined to go to. Iberia, KLM, Qatar, A, B, jet two. 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 bus, right, is. 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 Pace, quote, The soldier's search also took them to a sewer duct, which led to an underground labyrinth, where another 12 tons of cocaine hydrochlori 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. Reaver voice there, but holy moly, that is a lot of snow. Ecuador is now a nation with the third highest number of cocaine seizures in the world.

On January 24, cops make another coup when they kept 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 free 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 busts proof that his state of emergency is working. There are fewer violent deaths. There is more tranquillity. 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 Fito 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 Fito 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

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