A narco revolt takes a once-peaceful nation to the brink

This reconstruction of the day Ecuador nearly imploded contains previously unreported details of the Jan. 9 attacks and the government response to an insurrection that was the inevitable consequence of the unchecked rise of drug gangs; there are an estimated 40,000 drug gang members in Ecuador, the president said, equal to the number of soldiers in the country’s army. The Washington Post’s reporting is based on interviews with 15 current Ecuadorian officials — including the president, the attorney general, seven intelligence officials, and top generals in the armed forces and police — as well as a current gang leader and two former gang inmates, the U.S. ambassador to Ecuador and several of the journalists held hostage in the armed takeover of the TV station.

Ecuador was long known as an “island of peace,” an affordable and tranquil retirement destination for Americans. But after the end of Latin America’s commodities boom, and a 2016 earthquake in Ecuador, poverty and inequality rose. The government eliminated several institutions to cut costs, including the Justice Ministry. As the authorities’ control slipped, prison authorities began housing inmates according to gang membership.

A soldier keeps watch during a security operation in an impoverished neighborhood of Guayaquil on Jan. 12. (Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images)

A view of Guayaquil from the city's Santa Ana Hill. Guayaquil is Ecuador's largest city and a key hub in the cocaine trade. (Johanna Alarcón for The Washington Post)

The country’s small local gangs have become multimillion-dollar criminal enterprises fueled by the rising global demand for cocaine. The coronavirus pandemic gave them a vast pool of unemployed young men desperate for cash. And Ecuador’s dollarized economy and location — squeezed between the world’s two largest cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru — created an ideal transit point for international drug cartels moving cocaine to the United States or to Europe. After President Rafael Correa kicked the Americans out of a U.S. naval base in Manta in 2009, Ecuador’s coastline of ports was left with minimal protection.

Using the country’s prisons as command centers, Ecuadorian gangs have formed alliances with Mexican cartels and the Albanian mafia and infiltrated nearly every level of government in Ecuador. They have imported some of the gruesome violence associated with Mexico’s cartels, including decapitating victims and hanging them by their feet in public places. Children as young as 13 have been deployed as assassins.

As Ecuador finally fights back, it’s unclear if the country’s institutions can prevail.

The Jan. 9 attacks involved a rare alliance between rival gangs whose leaders felt threatened by Salazar’s Metastasis investigation and a vow by Noboa to isolate them within new maximum-security facilities, according to Ecuadorian investigators.

Timeline of gang violence in Ecuador

The violence, the attorney general said, was directed by Los Lobos — The Wolves — the same drug-trafficking organization accused of orchestrating last year’s assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, who had campaigned on an anti-corruption, anti-gang platform. But Los Lobos drew on the firepower of multiple criminal organizations to orchestrate the Jan. 9 attacks, officials said. That alliance was the clearest warning yet that the gangs would brook no challenges to their position — a sense of impunity that is being replicated by criminal organizations in country after country across Latin America.

The cocaine trade is booming like never before, and the vast riches it and other crimes generate are corroding institutions and democracy in the region. Across the globe, demand for cocaine has soared as America’s addiction has been replicated in Europe and Latin America itself. As cocaine users increase at a faster rate than the population — and as drug trafficking expands eastward, according to the United Nations — markets in Asia and Africa have begun to explode.

Anti-narcotics police guard packs of cocaine that were part of a three-ton shipment found in a container of bananas at the port of Guayaquil in 2022. (Marcos Pin/AFP/Getty Images)

South America now produces more than twice as much cocaine as it did a decade ago. Colombia, still the source of most of the world’s cocaine, logged record levels of coca production in 2022, and the amount of land used to grow that base ingredient is more than five times what it was when Pablo Escobar — among the first and most infamous of the Colombian drug lords — was killed in 1993.

The cartels have expanded their reach and extended their routes, penetrating ports from Costa Rica to Argentina, and turning nearly every Latin American mainland nation, including Ecuador, into major producers or movers of cocaine, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. Across Ecuador and much of Latin America, these criminal groups have also diversified their portfolios, relying heavily on extortion, kidnappings, illegal gold mining and migrant smuggling to grow their profits and gain territorial control.

A map of the route taken to illegal ship cocaine to the European market

This transformation could be considered a “third wave” of transnational crime in Latin America, according to security analyst Douglas Farah. In the first, Escobar began directly confronting the state. In the second, Colombia’s Cali cartel allied with Mexican cartels and homegrown guerrillas to bribe officials and create more-sophisticated distribution networks. But today’s crime is no longer a one-product, one-market enterprise focused on cocaine and the United States. An influx of new actors — from as far away as the Balkans and Russia — has turned Latin America into a sort of Silicon Valley for organized crime, Farah said, one that rewards innovation and diversification.

As these criminal structures penetrate institutions in Ecuador and across the region, the rise or fall of murder rates depends less on government actions and more on alliances between criminal groups, said Renato Rivera, coordinator of Ecuador’s Organized Crime Observatory, an initiative funded by the U.S. State Department.

“Those who set the rules of the game in Latin America are not the governments,” Rivera said, “but the criminal organizations.”

President Daniel Noboa in his office at the presidential palace in Quito. As chaos unfolded on Jan. 9, Noboa declared a state of "internal armed conflict" against the gangs. (Andres Yepez for The Washington Post)

‘Living in Gotham’

On Nov. 23, 2023, Noboa, the U.S.-educated son of a banana tycoon, took the oath of office as Ecuador’s president, vowing to restore public safety. That year, Ecuador recorded the highest murder rate in Central and South America, at more than 44 homicides for every 100,000 residents — a nearly 75 percent increase from a year earlier. The violence in Guayaquil had begun to resemble the worst years in Medellín, Colombia; parts of the city were off-limits to the police.

Noboa, 36, said he soon received a six-page letter from a leader of Los Lobos, asking for a meeting to negotiate a peace deal. The gang leader pledged to bring quiet to the country’s prisons and provide information to help dismantle rival gangs in exchange for government promises to protect the lives of Los Lobos figures and improve education access and work opportunities in the prisons. Instead, in one of his first major televised interviews, Noboa told a journalist he had a “nice plan” to regain control of the prisons. The massive Guayaquil penitentiary, he said, would start to look less like Quito’s central shopping mall, a place where inmates could obtain anything they wanted, from smartphones to flat-screen TVs. Weapons, including guns, were routinely smuggled in.

A map depicting the seven prisons in Ecuador where the military liberated hostages in January

“Just don’t tell Fito,” Noboa joked, referring to one of the country’s most prominent drug traffickers, José Adolfo “Fito” Macías Villamar. From behind prison walls in Guayaquil, officials said, Fito led Los Choneros, a gang that at one point claimed 5,000 members inside the prison system and 7,000 beyond, dominating a large part of Ecuador’s cocaine trade in partnership with Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.

By the start of 2024, violent deaths soared as the gangs tried to destabilize the government, officials said. Salazar warned that the gangs were planning “something big” and that sophisticated weapons were being smuggled into prisons. But military and police intelligence received no specific warnings about an attack at a TV station, officials said. Salazar privately pleaded with authorities to capture a gang leader from Los Lobos, Fabricio Colón Pico, who had threatened to kill her. It wasn’t until she revealed the death threats in a public hearing that security forces detained him.

Inmates shout from a prison rooftop in Guayaquil last August to demand the return of the gang leader known as “Fito,” who had been moved to a maximum-security prison. A judge later had him returned to the regional prison. (Martin Mejia/AP)

Soldiers enter Guayaquil's Litoral Penitentiary on Feb. 9, weeks after the military took control of the country's prisons. Thousands of people have been arrested during Ecuador's "internal armed conflict," and many of them are at Litoral. (John Moore/Getty Images)

Then on Jan. 7, the national police entered Ecuador’s most infamous prison, the Guayaquil regional penitentiary, to check on Fito, following reports that he had escaped. The drug lord was gone. He had simply walked out the front door days earlier, intelligence officials later learned, after he was tipped off about plans to relocate him.

It was the “worst day” of Noboa’s new presidency, said Esteban Torres, Noboa’s deputy government minister.

On the morning of Jan. 9, Noboa woke up at 5 a.m., as he often did, to work out in the gym a few doors down from his office in the presidential palace. While running on the treadmill, he saw on his phone that Colón Pico, only recently detained, had escaped from prison, crawling out of a hole he had carved in a prison wall.

“It was like we were living in Gotham,” Noboa said. “All of the crazy people had escaped.”

Noboa got off the treadmill and called the minister of government and acting interior minister, Mónica Palencia.

“We’re doing it,” he said, setting his plan in motion.

The TC Televisión news studio where armed men stormed into a live broadcast and held more than a dozen staff members hostage on Jan. 9. (Johanna Alarcón for The Washington Post)

‘They want to kill us’

It was already a busy news day at TC Televisión as editor in chief Alina Manrique made last-minute changes to the script for the afternoon broadcast. Prison unrest. A bomb at a police station.

At 2:13 p.m., in a WhatsApp group chat for the TC Televisión newsroom, a reporter shared a news release from the Education Ministry announcing that classes would be canceled at schools near the country’s prisons. Manrique was about to add the item to the lineup when another group message landed.

“They want to kill us all,” a reporter posted, after a colleague saw armed men storming the building. “Urgent. They want to kill us in TC.”

Manrique heard gunshots and glass shattering, then screams. She ran into a bathroom, and two colleagues followed her.

A TC Televisión anchor, who was present during the Jan. 9 attack, prepares to record the midday news on Feb. 2. (Johanna Alarcón for The Washington Post)

Thirteen mostly masked young men — carrying a machine gun, several shotguns, revolvers, grenades and at least three sets of explosives — had burst through the channel’s front gate, taking the lone security guard as their first hostage.

As shots rang out, about 180 staff members searched for hiding places throughout the three-story building, texting their contacts in the police department or the presidential palace for help.

Manrique knelt on a toilet in a dark bathroom stall, huddled silently next to her two colleagues. She turned the brightness down on her phone and stuck it in her bra. She was shaking so much, she said, it felt like the toilet was coming loose. As the gunmen entered the bathroom, shouting for people to come out, Manrique and her colleagues walked out of the stall with their hands up.

The gunmen marched the three journalists to the studio. One ripped off Manrique’s necklace, grabbed her by the hair and threw her to the ground. She thought about her two children, and prayed they wouldn’t have to see their mother die on live television.

The gunmen, wearing baseball hats and athletic gear, milled around the studio, shouting and waving their guns.

“The mafia has the power,” one of them proclaimed. “The president can’t do anything to us.”

But these men — and boys — didn’t seem to have much idea of what to do next or a plan for escape. As it became apparent from the sound of helicopters that police were massing outside, the youngest of the gang members, ages 15 and 17, became visibly agitated. One attacker put dynamite in a TV anchor’s pocket and forced him to plead with police on television not to enter the building.

Eventually, the men grabbed Manrique and five others and moved them to another studio. They started searching for an escape route, climbing up on the catwalk hanging over another studio and trying to find an opening in the ceiling. They called a gang leader on the outside: Could he send help?

When they realized they were no longer on the air, gang members forced the hostages to live-stream on Instagram and tell the police to leave. With a gun to her head, a 22-year-old production assistant, only on her second day at work, offered to film using her phone.

A group of tactical police officers in full riot gear was already inside the building. Victor Herrera, the head of the police force for Guayaquil, was mulling whether to give the order to breach.

“It was a situation that obligated us to make decisions in the moment, and to make them fast,” he recalled.

A woman watches a police operation from her home in Mount Sinai, a town in the Guayaquil area. (Johanna Alarcón for Washington Post)

‘This is terrorism’

U.S. Ambassador Michael J. Fitzpatrick was stepping out of a meeting with the foreign minister in Quito when he saw the news on his phone. A group of armed men had taken over the studio of TC Televisión.

Here we go, he said to himself. Just weeks earlier, Fitzpatrick had warned in a speech that the influence of the gangs was destroying the state. For many Ecuadorians, the ambassador’s indictment was self-evident, though somewhat unwelcome coming from a gringo.

The foreign minister called Fitzpatrick and told him the president would like to speak with him.

“Turn the car around,” Fitzpatrick told his driver. “Let’s go to the presidential palace.”

The ambassador was invited straight up to Noboa’s office. Fitzpatrick would stay for hours, watching the president and his top ministers and aides as they tried to get a grip on what was happening.

Soldiers and police patrol amid traffic on the streets of Guayaquil. (Johanna Alarcón for The Washington Post)

The sense of confusion was compounded by the amount of misinformation circulating on social media. Videos purported to show armed takeovers at metro stops, universities, hospitals and other key facilities across the country. Another video falsely showed the execution of inmates in a prison. In cities across the country, including the capital, emergency call centers were fielding hundreds of reports of suspicious objects; everyone thought there was a car bomb on their street.

“No one knew what was coming next,” Fitzpatrick said, comparing the chaos to the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States.

Fitzpatrick sat mostly silent as Noboa finalized the declaration of armed conflict with his aides. But during a quiet moment, the ambassador and president discussed the implications of such a decision. The two considered what it would mean to classify the gangs as enemy combatants, under international humanitarian laws of war.

“This is terrorism,” Noboa said. “They’ve taken this to the next level.”

‘Stay still’

Herrera, the police commander in charge of the scene, had spent two decades leading a specialized unit for hostage situations. He knew that protocol required him to wait for a hostage negotiator to arrive. But as he watched the gunmen on the live feed, he was afraid that their obvious lack of discipline could lead one of them to kill a hostage. He decided not to wait.

The commander forced open the door to the studio and stepped inside, his rifle pointed straight ahead.

“Put your hands on your neck!” he shouted to the gunmen from behind a riot shield, according to body-camera footage provided to The Post. “Come to the front. Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you. … I’m talking to you. Put your weapon in the front where I can see it. Nothing will happen.”

Gen. Victor Herrera, commander of Guayaquil's police force, led the operation to enter the TC Televisión studio. (Johanna Alarcón for The Washington Post)

The armed men, who had concluded they were out of options, slowly walked toward him, holding on to several of the hostages.

“Put the weapon right there,” Herrera told one of them, who slid his rifle onto the studio floor.

“Stay still. Stay right there,” the police commander said.

As Manrique watched the men hand over their weapons, she tried to get up off the floor, but her body wouldn’t let her. All she could do was reach a hand toward a police officer, who lifted her off the ground and took her out through an emergency exit to the street.

“You’re okay,” the officer told her. “You’re alive.”

Police patrol during an operation to seize weapons, drugs and explosives in Nueva Prosperina, one of the most dangerous sectors of Guayaquil. (Johanna Alarcón for The Washington Post)

Singing the national anthem

By 3:15 p.m., the armed conflict declaration had been signed by Noboa and uploaded to the official government website. Ecuador was in a state of war.

Gen. Alexander Levoyer, previously in charge of the armed forces in violent Esmeraldas province, was tasked with leading the operation. In a matter of hours, he moved troops, planes, tanks, armored vehicles and heavy weapons from the borders to the country’s main cities.

“We needed to raise our voice, to say that we are soldiers, we have lethal weapons and we have the capabilities for a conventional war,” Levoyer said in an interview, “and it pains us to have to use that weapon against our fellow citizens.”

His first task was to regain control of the prisons — the gangs had taken 162 people hostage across seven penitentiaries. On Jan. 13, he started with a facility in the city of Ambato, tucked beneath the Andes in Ecuador’s Central Valley. The soldiers arrived on armored personnel carriers, and the inmates felt the ground tremble as they approached.

“We are the armed forces,” the soldiers announced on loudspeakers. “Lay down your weapons. Liberate your hostages.”

The gangs surrendered without a fight. Levoyer told his soldiers to raise the Ecuadorian flag and sing the national anthem. One by one, in the days that followed, the armed forces took control of 18 prisons.

Troops, and a newly empowered police force, have been pushing into neighborhoods controlled by the gangs and raiding illicit drug facilities. In an operation in early February, police raided homes in one of Guayaquil’s most dangerous neighborhoods — they needed no warrant to do so under the declaration of armed conflict — and found weapons, dynamite, cocaine and marijuana. As of late March, security forces had detained 16,459 people. Police have seized more than 78 tons of cocaine since the start of the year, including 22 tons in just one raid, officials said.

Police return to their patrols after raiding two houses in the Ciudad de Diós area of Guayaquil. Ecuador's state of internal armed conflict allowed police to enter homes without warrants. (Johanna Alarcón for The Washington Post)

A police official in charge of a drug and weapons seizure speaks to the media after the raid of a home in Nueva Prosperina. (Johanna Alarcón for The Washington Post)

The cocaine trade has taken a hit. The logistics of moving the product have become riskier, and more expensive. Before Jan. 9, it cost $100,000 to $150,000 to move one ton of cocaine in Guayaquil, according to one gang leader. Now it costs $300,000 to $350,000.

“We’re using one of our last cards” Levoyer said of the government action. “Imagine if the armed forces fail, God forbid. Could Ecuador become a failed state?”

Human rights activists warned, however, that Noboa’s declaration allowed the government to arrest anyone it accused of “terrorism,” and opened the door to profiling based on tattoos or other indicators of gang membership — an approach similar to that of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who has jailed more than 1 percent of his country’s population in a nearly two-year war against gangs.

On Friday, an emboldened Noboa drew international outrage by ordering security forces to storm the Mexican Embassy in Quito to arrest a former vice president, Jorge Glas, who was seeking refuge there from multiple corruption convictions. Mexico’s president called Noboa’s move a violation of international law and responded by breaking off diplomatic relations with Ecuador.

But Noboa’s action was met with support at home, where his approval ratings are among the highest for a president in South America.

On Sunday, Noboa issued a decree extending the state of internal armed conflict, allowing the military to continue operations against the country’s gangs. The president plans to hold a referendum on April 21 to decide whether to give the military and security forces some kind of permanent control over prisons and ports.

Officials have warned that the gangs could fight back with a vengeance.

“Once you lift your foot off the snake,” said one intelligence official, “it can bite you.”

Diana Salazar Méndez, Ecuador's attorney general, with her security guards at her office in Quito. She has faced repeated death threats as a result of her probe of links between drug traffickers and the country's top institutions. (Johanna Alarcón for The Washington Post)

Although top gang leaders, including Fito and Colón Pico, remain on the run, the attorney general has become a prisoner in her own home. Salazar leaves the house only to go to her office, which bristles with security. She can’t go to the grocery store, a restaurant or any public place. She exercises, gets her hair cut and meets her friends in her home. Her 9-year-old daughter, donning a bulletproof vest, travels to school with a security detail and arrives at different times every day.

Salazar doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to live normally again. “The criminals will never forgive me,” she said.