Everyone liked Goofy. He didn't hurt anyone. It was not known for certain who his father was, and his alcoholic mother left him home alone for weeks. He became a petty thief, stealing a T-shirt from a clothesline, a gas bottle from an unsuspecting housewife, and a soft drink from the corner store that he hid in his pants. For the neighbors it was just as annoying as stinging insects. One day, however, he robbed the wrong person in El Arbolito, a neighborhood in Durán, the municipality with the highest murder rate in Ecuador. The gang leader in that area, nicknamed Bob Marley because he was black, ordered his right hand to be cut off at the wrist with a machete. Goofy now begs for money from drivers who stop at the traffic lights on a long avenue leading to Guayaquil. He shows them his stump through the window.
Bob Marley was arrested in 2020 and accused of being behind a wave of murders in El Arbolito. The place is of strategic importance for the drug trade: the arms of an adjacent river flow into the sea, from where boats set sail for the rest of the world. 60% of the world's cocaine trade takes place here. Criminals no longer drive cars in this area but now use motorboats. Ecuadorian gangs have become the Amazon of drug exports in collaboration with Mexican cartels. This windfall has allowed his power to grow spectacularly in just three years. They control prisons, ports, customs, taxi fleets and fruit and fish markets. They managed to infiltrate the police and army. They have judges and prosecutors on their payroll. Their tentacles have reached politics, where they have experienced mayors and governors. Criminal gangs threaten to control all of the state's resources almost overnight.
Recent governments have been helpless in supporting the expansion of the drug trade. Nothing could stop him. Current President Daniel Noboa, son of the richest man in the country, 36 years old and barely two months in office, has declared war on them by presidential decree. 22 of these gangs are considered terrorist organizations, which gives the army the opportunity to take direct action against them. In addition, Noboa has not shown great leadership strength; on the one hand, his public speeches are countable. No one knows exactly what plan he has for dealing with the biggest security crisis in his country's history.
Two soldiers arrest a man who violated the curfew in the Flor de Bastión neighborhood of Guayaquil. Santiago Arcos
The military is currently patrolling the streets. Tonight, armed to the teeth, the ground forces infantry marched into La Peca, a neighborhood of low-rise concrete houses with power lines running through them. The moonlight shines like a lamp. “We know that there are criminal groups in this sector,” says Captain Carlos Riofrío. His men show off their long guns and clatter their boots on the asphalt. In their wake, the few who violated the curfew, which begins at 11 p.m., seek refuge in their homes. They lock the doors and lock the windows. A few peek through the curtain, but they hide as soon as they feel like they're being watched. With their faces hidden behind their balaclavas, the soldiers charge into the night like riders of death.
“There, there,” calls the captain, pointing to a side street.
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Four shadows run into the darkness.
The soldiers jump out of the truck and chase them through the neighborhood. Screams and gasps can be heard. One of the boys stops running, takes off his shoes and stands against the wall with his arms raised. A Heckler & Koch rifle is pointed at his chest. His face shows a grimace of horror. In front, a soldier has knocked over another on the sidewalk and is pressing the sole of his boot into his back. It's aimed directly at his head. A third throws himself to the ground and is suddenly surrounded by cannons. Even the last one sees death up close and he too surrenders. In less than a minute they were neutralized.
They check her arms, back and chest for tattoos. They want to find machetes and wolves, evidence that they belong to the main gangs Los Choneros and Los Lobos. The boys have nothing with them, no drugs, no weapons, just a few pieces of jewelry they rescued from the trash. Nevertheless, they put them in patrol cars to check their criminal records. This morning they have already hunted at least four.
These days, videos of abuse by authorities have been leaked. In one case, they put three boys in a hole and sprayed them with pepper spray without letting them come out. It is one of the tests that soldiers take during their military training. Security experts fear, among other things, that the president's broad crackdown could lead to human rights violations, as was the case in Mexico when Felipe Calderón took the military out of the barracks, or recently in the case of El Salvador. “We have to destroy the enemy,” admits a soldier as the search for gang members continues this evening.
Two very thin boys wearing hats are hiding between some cars. You can see them with the naked eye, you don't have to be particularly smart. The soldiers subdue them in no time. They lock her against the hood of the car and search her. They also don't carry anything important with them. When a neighbor sees the scene, he dares to come to the door of his house and shouts at the boys: “You two are not even fit for crooks (criminals).” He says they are two drug addicts who are fed up with him because they were roaming the neighborhood to see what they could get. The soldiers let them go and they walk away while pulling up their pants, looking as if they had crossed paths with the devil. In the hours that follow, the military convoy will encounter prostitutes, beggars, crazy people, drunks and idlers who do not fear death. Nothing to hang a medal on. The government has made public that it has arrested 1,105 people, dismantled 28 “terror groups,” released 56 kidnapped people and held 27 prisoners in the week it sought to take control of the country. According to official information, two police officers and five suspected criminals died along the way.
A power forged in prisons
Gang power has been atomized in prisons, even if it sounds counterintuitive. President Rafael Correa tightened the penal code and quadrupled the prison population from 10,000 to 40,000. It has drastically reduced the number of homicides. Ecuador was a security bubble in the middle of two violent countries like Peru and Colombia. But under the radar, the proliferation of gangs and their recruitment into prisons began to spread. The boys went to prison without any connection for doing business, for running over a woman with a motorcycle in a crosswalk, or for hitting her friend, and there they were forced to join one of the gangs in order to survive to connect. If you don't, put a noose around your neck.
At first, Los Choneros dominated the rest and had a charismatic leader, Jorge Luis Zambrano alias Rasquiña. The Chone Killers, Tiguerones – former prison guards who went into the underworld – Lobos and Lagartos responded to Rasquiña until he was murdered in December 2020. That marked a before and after. The gangs broke up and began fighting for dominance. There were prison riots. In 2021, more than 100 prisoners were murdered with knives and machetes in a prison in Guayaquil. The winners beheaded the losers and threw their heads into the toilets. One of them had his chest opened, his heart taken out and bitten while it was still beating. The guards, complicit through annexation or incompetence, witnessed the massacre without being able to do anything about it.
Two police officers search for weapons and drugs in the Flor de Bastión neighborhood of Guayaquil during the curfew imposed in Ecuador. Santiago Arcos
On that day, when madness reigned, a non-marginalized boy took part in the carnage, trying to remain invisible so that no one would notice his presence. He had been jailed months earlier for illegal association, a crime fabricated for him because he was one of the student leaders in the protests against Guillermo Lasso, a president who allowed crime to grow like ivy during his two and a half years in office. Carlos, to give him a name, entered the Guayaquil prison in the dark, not knowing what he would find. His mother, a lawyer, campaigned for his release. On the first day they told him he would have to pay $80 a week (73 euros) for shelter and access to a bed and food. If he didn't, he would end up in El Hoyo, the punishment cell where the poor, the crippled and the homeless without a toilet are crowded together.
Carlos paid, but those who failed were enslaved by the leaders of the pavilions. They wash clothes, clean rooms, cook and serve as sexual objects. Only the poorest boys, those who kill without consideration, those who become killers, gunmen, are saved from this. The prisons are full of prisoners who have served more than 60% of their sentence, which should grant them freedom, but due to the corrupt bureaucratic system that surrounds the process, it is very difficult. 90% of those who have exceeded this time do not manage to leave, they remain in limbo. They must prove that they have not committed a crime, provide a psychological report, prove that they have attended advanced academic training, and provide a notarized document from a family member or friend assuring that they will provide a roof for them. In practice, these workshops do not exist, psychological tests have to be faked because there are none, and the judges' secretaries do not set a date for the trial unless they receive a bribe. Virtually everyone who sees the light gets it by blackmailing some official. Carlos, now wearing a jacket and tie and free, is committed to helping some prisoners cope with this process.
The government has recaptured some of the country's most violent prisons, such as the one in Guayaquil, but that has happened in the past and the gangs have returned to rule them. People fear that after this period of turmoil everything will return to normality, that is, to gang rule, with entrenched cartels, as is the case in Mexico, where crime predominates. As one of the soldiers hiding behind a balaclava with his rifle raised recalls, existence can be summed up in a simple equation:
– Either we kill or they kill us. There is no one else.
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