Cocaine Trade and Gang Violence Strike Hard in Once-Peaceful Ecuador

· Weary Ecuadoreans look to migrate to escape homicides and extortion

· Once one of Latin America’s safest countries, Ecuador has become one of the region’s deadliest.

· Some 68,000 Ecuadoreans have arrived at the U.S. southern border, up from 5,727 in the year-earlier period.

GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador—On his first day as mayor, Luis Chonillo said, he ran for his life from would-be assassins.

Chonillo was on his way to his first city council meeting as mayor of Durán, a gang-ridden suburb of Guayaquil on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, when gunmen fired on his car and shot dead his two police bodyguards, he and police said. A stray bullet killed a passerby. Chonillo’s driver crashed into a truck. Wearing a suit and tie, the mayor ran down a dirt road, escaping into a stranger’s house.

“God gave us another opportunity,” Chonillo said, describing the event and how he and his family briefly fled to an undisclosed country. “The way they attacked us, we should have never survived.”

Once one of Latin America’s safest countries, Ecuador has become one of the region’s deadliest. Record cocaine production in neighboring Colombia and a war among Ecuadorean drug gangs propped up by Mexican and Albanian cartels has sparked a wave of violence, police and security experts say, rocking President Guillermo Lasso’s government.

Homicides have quadrupled since 2019, reaching a record 4,800 last year and driving a surge in migration, mainly to the U.S., according to the Interior Ministry. Since October, the start of the 2023 fiscal year, some 68,000 Ecuadoreans have arrived at the U.S. southern border, up from 5,727 in the year-earlier period, according to the U.S. Border Patrol. Gang violence has increased significantly since 2020, as did economic hardship from the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Everybody is looking for a way to leave, because they don’t see any possibility of things improving,” said Billy Navarrete, director of the Guayaquil-based Committee for the Defense of Human Rights.

The carnage in Guayaquil, a city of three million where gangs fight for control of cocaine-trafficking routes to maritime ports, resembles scenes from the drug wars of northern Mexico. Police and residents say that assassins gun down prosecutors and law-enforcement officers, bodies are hung from bridges, and gangs detonate car bombs and recruit children as hitmen.

Local media outlets say that death threats have led them to stop publishing the bylines of reporters who write about crime. Parents said that soldiers recently stood guard outside schools in Durán after a gang threatened to kill students. Some wealthy residents pay as much as $30,000 to bulletproof their cars, according to Lautaro Ojeda Salvador, the owner of a company that provides the service.

Killings in Guayaquil are up about 65% in the first four months of 2023 from a year earlier, according to the police, making it one of the world’s most violent cities. That means Guayaquil is on track to have more homicides per capita than cities such as Juárez, Mexico, and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, had last year, according to the Citizen Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, a Mexico-based organization that tracks the world’s most dangerous cities.

“We’ve never lived through what is happening right now,” said Jorge Wated, a businessman who led a government task force to collect bodies here during the pandemic. He said the number of dead “is like another pandemic.”

For years, Ecuador seemed blessed. Violence from the drug trade rarely spilled into the country even though it sits between the world’s top cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru.

But in the aftermath of a ban on aerial fumigation of drug crops in Colombia in 2015, cocaine production there soared, with much of the drug going through Ecuador because of its porous border and weak port security, according to local security experts and Western officials.

“The stakes have become so high now because there is so much cocaine flowing out of Colombia and through Ecuador,” said Antoine Vella, an expert on cocaine trafficking at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “We are talking about a lot of money.”

Mexican gangs mainly send cocaine to the U.S., while Albanian gangs orchestrate shipments to Europe from Ecuador, according to Ecuadorean law-enforcement officials.

In Ecuador, much of the violence has taken place since the powerful leader of the Choneros, a gang with links to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, was killed in December 2020, causing the gang to splinter, according to current and former law-enforcement officials. Smaller gangs that had been part of the Choneros—such as the Wolves, the Chone Killers and Los Tiguerones, whose gang symbol is a tiger with a military beret—began to fight it out for the spoils, current and former officials said in interviews. Mexican cartels encouraged the gang fragmentation, said Mario Pazmiño, the Ecuadorean army’s former director of intelligence.

“The Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels began to pressure the Ecuadorean gangs to become independent and to work with them,” Pazmiño said. “This allowed them to have more gangs at their service in order to protect their cargo.”

Ecuador’s prisons, which police and prison guards say are controlled by gangs, became killing fields, with inmates cutting their rivals into pieces during hourslong riots, according to guards, human-rights groups and police. More than 430 inmates died in massacres in 2021 and 2022, according to the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights.

A 23-year-old former guard at Guayaquil’s Litoral Penitentiary said in a phone interview that he recalled having to clean up the limbs of victims. At night, he would wake up sweating from nightmares. Inmates eventually demanded he work for their gang, he said. He said he received threatening cellphone messages with pictures of his girlfriend.

In October the guard fled Ecuador for the U.S., where he is currently, after he was threatened.

“They told me they’d kill me and all of my family,” he said.

Police said in August that gang members targeting a rival set off an explosion in the working-class Cristo del Consuelo neighborhood, killing five people and destroying several homes.

“Today, people don’t go out unless they have to,” said Scarlett Choez, a resident in the neighborhood whose father lost an eye in the blast. “There’s a lot of fear.”

The gangs have corrupted law enforcement, said Max Campos, former deputy interior minister during Lasso’s administration.

In episodes that have garnered national attention, a group of transit officers from the coastal city of Manta have been killed, one by one, by a drug gang in recent months after they appeared to have taken $7 million from a dealer in a traffic stop, police officials said.

The first transit agent was shot in the head while playing soccer, police said last year. Assassins shot another while he was driving, and a third was found dead under a bridge with stab wounds. A fourth was gunned down while cleaning his car.

A fifth transit officer was killed last month in Guayaquil, where he had fled. Two days later, gunmen sprayed his funeral with bullets, killing four more people and injuring some 16 others, according to police. The gunmen even fired bullets into the officer’s casket, said police and witnesses.

“What horror,” Manta’s mayor, Agustín Intriago, said that day. “What happened in Manta today goes beyond a settling of scores.”

The lawlessness has fueled a backlash against Lasso, a conservative. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Lasso said his government is cracking down, with drug seizures increasing fivefold. The government has taken to classifying the violence as acts of war against the state perpetrated by terrorist groups.

“The state is responding,” the president said. “Those who commit these acts of terror are military targets that, with the support of the national police, will be taken down.”

The U.S. is backing Ecuador’s fight against drug traffickers, including helping to create a new court in Quito to handle organized-crime cases and training specialized antinarcotics units, a U.S. official at the embassy in Quito said.

Success, though, seems distant for locals. Miguel Mero, a taxi driver, recalled seeing two corpses hanging from a pedestrian bridge in February 2022 in Durán, where homes lack running water and young men openly snort cheap, highly addictive drugs on the streets.

He said one gang offered to give him a new car in exchange for transporting drugs. Another wanted to use a plot of land he owns to stash drugs.

“I’ve been tempted a lot, but I’ve always said no,” he said. “Because once you get involved, you can’t get out. And if you want to get out, the first thing they do is kill a family member, a son, a brother, your mom.”

A couple of years ago, masked men knocked on Carmen Gonzalez’s door, demanding her small chicken business pay $50 a day. “They threatened to go after my children,” she said. “They were going to kidnap them.”

Unable to make the payments, she closed her business last year. Today, she makes a living cleaning homes. But she has a plan: migrate with her family to the U.S.

“I don’t have any alternatives,” she said.