Just weeks before Ecuador descended into chaos, with prison riots, two criminal bosses on the run and the brief siege of a television station, the country’s top prosecutor launched a major operation aimed at rooting out narco-corruption at the highest levels of government.
The investigation, dubbed the “Metastasis Case,” led to raids across Ecuador and more than 30 arrests.
The defendants include judges accused of having granted favorable sentences to the leaders of the gangs, police officers who allegedly altered evidence and handed over weapons in prisons, and the former director of the penitentiary administration himself, accused of having reserved special treatment for a powerful drug trafficker.
They had been implicated by text chats and call logs recovered from cellphones belonging to the drug trafficker, who was murdered while in prison.
When the attorney general, Diana Salazar, announced the charges last month, she said the investigation had revealed the spread of criminal groups in Ecuador’s institutions. She too warned of a possible “escalation of violence” in the following days, and stated that the executive branch had been put on alert.
This week his prediction came true.
Interviews with security experts and intelligence sources reveal what may have sparked violence in Ecuador this week, so intense that it prompted the president, Daniel Noboa, to declare war on the gangs and impose a state of emergency.
According to interviews, the attorney general’s investigation played a critical role.
“Metastasis is where it all starts,” said Mario Pazmiño, a retired colonel and former director of intelligence for the Ecuadorian army and an independent security analyst.
The raids put pressure on Noboa, who took office in November and has promised to crack down on gangs and clean up the prison system, to take concrete steps, Pazmiño said.
The president assured that big changes are coming. While he did not say publicly what they were, officials said the changes included the relocation of several powerful gang leaders to a maximum-security facility known as La Roca, or The Rock, in Guayaquil, a major coastal city.
Gang leaders learned of the plan before the move could take place, however, most likely through a government leak, officials said. And on Sunday, Adolfo Macías, who runs a gang called the Choneros and is widely considered the leader of Ecuador’s most powerful gang, disappeared from his cell.
As inmates clashed with guards in prisons across the country, another gang leader, Fabricio Colón Pico, who runs Los Lobos, escaped from a prison near the city of Riobamba early Tuesday morning.
Experts said gang leaders wanted to avoid La Roca because security would be tighter and they would likely lose access to electronic devices such as cellphones. The leaders also feared that if they intermarried with their La Roca rivals, they might be killed.
“Every one of them would be in danger,” Pazmiño said. “That was the breaking point.”
In response to the planned relocation, experts say leaders likely ordered gang members – from prisons that serve as command centers – to fight back.
And so, on Tuesday, Ecuadorians experienced violence the likes of which they hadn’t seen in years, even as gang warfare rocked the once-peaceful country. In several prisons, inmates took guards and staff members hosted. A video on social media showed guards being held at knifepoint.
In cities and towns, police officers have been kidnapped, cars have been set on fire and explosives have been detonated.
Guayaquil suffered the most violence, with gunmen descending not only on the studio of the TC Televisión network during a broadcast, but also on several hospitals and opening fire near at least one school.
At least 11 people died in the chaos, most in Guayaquil, and nearly 200 prison staff were taken hostage.
The attorney general’s revelations – and Noboa’s subsequent plan to relocate gang leaders – had provoked intense anger.
“Operation Metastasis is like kicking a hornet’s nest,” said Gustavo Flores-Macías, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell University who specializes in Latin America.
Before the operation, gang leaders appeared to have reached a state of “equilibrium,” he said, in which they felt they could run their lucrative crime rings, even from behind bars, with the cooperation of authorities.
“Let’s say the gangs operate with a level of impunity, and let’s say they’re quite happy with it,” Flores-Macías said. “What Metastasis is doing is upsetting this existing balance that allows them to do business as usual. So there is a reaction in this criminal world, and it takes the form of these quite violent and spectacular actions.”
Ms. Salazar’s office responded by saying they would not be granting interviews due to the ongoing security situation.
The violence unleashed by the gangs was repressed by force. On Tuesday afternoon, Noboa took the extraordinary step of declaring an internal armed conflict, unleashing the army against two dozen gangs in the country.
In the days following the statement, authorities said police and forces had killed five people involved in gang-related violence and arrested more than 850.
The U.S. State Department released a statement Thursday saying American law enforcement, military and government officials will visit Ecuador to assist in the fight against what the department called “appalling levels of violence and terrorism at the hands of narco-criminal elements”.
A person who works in Ecuadorian intelligence, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said Thursday that gang leaders appeared to have been chastised by the ferocious response to this week’s violence and had ordered calm in the streets. and prisons.
The two gang leaders, Mr. Macías and Mr. Colón, remained at large.
Mr. Colón, who had been arrested a week before his escape and whom Ms. Salazar had accused of plotting to kill her, posted a video Thursday on, the site formerly known as Twitter. Appearing wearing a parka and a skullcap, he said he only escaped because he believed he would be killed if he remained in custody.
He told the president he would turn himself in if his safety was guaranteed. In a radio interview, Mr. Noboa said he would not have offered him such a deal.
Ms. Salazar, Ecuador’s first black attorney general, was appointed in 2019. The following year she prosecuted the former president, Rafael Correa, on corruption charges, recommending an eight-year sentence, the maximum sentence , after being convicted.
Its latest investigation began after the death of gang leader Leandro Norero in 2022.
Mr. Norero was the founder of the Chone Killers and had become one of the country’s most powerful drug lords and financiers, forging ties with the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel in Mexico, the attorney general said.
He was serving a sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering when he was killed in a prison massacre.
At the time of his death, prison officials and experts say, he was trying to unite rival gangs into a cartel.
Ms. Salazar said he had also rewarded judges, police officers, guards and others who had helped him and his associates with apartments, cars, cash and prostitutes.
Among the people reported by Mr. Norero’s cell phone records was Pablo Ramírez, the former head of the prison authority, accused of giving preferential treatment to Mr. Norero. Mr. Ramirez denied having any contact with Mr. Norero.
Wilman Terán, head of the country’s Judicial Council and a former magistrate of the country’s highest court, was also charged. Mr. Terán, whose council supervises and disciplines judges and prosecutors, has denied being part of Mr. Norero’s vast network of favors. The board stood by him, calling Ms. Salazar’s operation a smear campaign.
The day before the operation, believers believed to be sympathetic to former President Correa announced a plan to investigate Ms. Salazar, claiming that she had been selective in the cases she followed.
Around the same time, Mr. Correa posted a message on Platform .
“Narco-politics has been revealed in Ecuador,” Ms. Salazar said in announcing the arrests made.
In a hearing that lasted several hours, he described how drug traffickers have penetrated Ecuador’s political system and its prisons.
The cellphone evidence transcripts totaled 15,000 pages.
Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia; José María León Cabrera from Quito, Ecuador; AND Thalie Ponce from Guayaquil, Ecuador.