This week witnessed Ecuador’s descent into violent chaos, bringing the Andean nation of 18 million to the edge of civil war. Although the once-tranquil country has seen rising violence, including the assassination of a presidential candidate last summer, events unfolding in the new year reveal that Ecuador is in danger of state collapse and capture by drug cartels.
The mayhem erupted with the Jan. 7 jailbreak of one of the country’s top mafia bosses, Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, better known as Fito, who has headed the Los Choneros cartel since 2020. Although the gangs largely run Ecuador’s prisons by themselves, Fito knew he was about to be transferred to a different prison, so he escaped. Riots and worse followed Fito’s breakout, especially in Guayaquil, the port city where the narco boss had been incarcerated. Guayaquil is Ecuador’s biggest city and not coincidentally the hub of the country’s cocaine exports.
On Jan. 9, Los Choneros gunmen, some of them minors, took over a TV station in Guayaquil, taking journalists hostage until heavily armed police ended the siege. Several Guayaquil hospitals and schools witnessed attacks by armed gangsters. The mayhem then spread across Ecuador. Soon, police officers and even random civilians were being assaulted by the cartels as order broke down completely.
Ecuador’s youthful president, 36-year-old Daniel Noboa, in office for less than two months, chose to fight back. He has effectively declared war against the cartels. Noboa proclaimed a state of emergency with a nationwide curfew to “neutralize” the drug mafias. This week, he explained: “We are in a state of war and we cannot give in to these terrorist groups,” pledging to “relentlessly confront” more than 20,000 members of “terrorist organizations,” adding colorfully, “This government is taking the necessary actions that in recent years nobody wanted to take. And that requires balls the size of ostrich eggs.”
Here, Noboa is channeling El Salvador’s youthful President Nayib Bukele, whose own war on organized crime has crushed the mafias and drastically reduced that country’s chronic violence, making Bukele the bad guy to international human rights groups, but a hero to most Salvadorans. The Miami-born and American-educated Noboa is taking a calculated risk that anything less than drastic action will witness Ecuador’s takeover by narco cartels.
Just five years ago, Ecuador was one of the safest countries in Latin America, with a low murder rate and only modest problems with organized crime, despite being nested between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two biggest sources of cocaine. What happened?
In one word: Albania.
In recent years, since the government permitted many foreigners to stay in the country visa-free for extended periods, foreign criminal syndicates have moved into Ecuador. They have made the country a key player in the global cocaine trade, with the dirty money and murder that brings. While the mafias involved are not just Albanian, with Mexican and other Latin American cartels taking their piece of Ecuador’s burgeoning cocaine trade, Balkan mobsters have played the key role in transforming the country into a murder-plagued narco-state.
As this newspaper has reported, over the last decade, little Albania, a NATO member, has become Europe’s leading narco-state and a top player in the global illegal drug trade. Sophisticated and violent Albania mafia groups, many of them based on family clans, have gone global, consolidating their illegal narcotics business. Albanian criminals have transformed Ecuador into a preferred conduit for cocaine from Colombia and Peru headed especially to Europe.
The cocaine leaves Guayaquil, often stashed in shipments of bananas, a major Ecuadorian export, headed for ports around the world, especially Antwerp, where Albanian gangsters ship it all over Europe. Growth has been enormous. One-third of the cocaine seized by Ecuadorian police in 2021 was headed to Europe, compared to less than 10% two years before.
Ecuadorian intelligence and police have been overwhelmed by the sophistication and violence of Albanian drug gangs, who partnered with local cartels to maximize efficiency and profit. The Albanians buy off local officials with ease and are willing to intimidate or kill those who won’t be bought. European authorities have pressed Ecuador to get tough. Last year, Spanish police broke up an Albanian gang that was smuggling cocaine to Spain from Guayaquil hidden in frozen fish shipments, but that barely made a dent in the trade. Efforts in 2023 by Ecuadorian police to investigate cartel corruption of government officials stalled when the top suspect was found dead.
The situation is worsening. This week witnessed the jailbreak of Fabricio Colon Pico, leader of the Los Lobos cartel, who’s nicknamed “The Savage.” He was in custody for threatening to assassinate Ecuador’s attorney general. Los Lobos, the country’s biggest drug gang, is known for its especially close ties with Albanian mafias.
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The Biden administration promised to help Ecuador in its new war against the cartels, with the State Department and the White House assuring Quito of their support. However, the difficult reality is that the Biden administration is uncomfortably close to the Albanian government, which is itself deeply involved in the drug trade. Pretending that Albania isn’t a narco-state, and now a global problem too, as Team Biden keeps doing, means this crisis will only get worse.
If the Biden administration wants to stave off civil war in Ecuador, the best thing it can do is tell its friends in the Albanian government to crack down on their own mobsters, who now pose a threat to law and order on multiple continents.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.