By Alexandra Valencia
GUAYAQUIL/QUITO (Reuters) -The death toll of the March shoot-out in several houses in Nueva Prosperina, one of Guayaquil's most violent neighborhoods, was 22.
Police say the bloodshed was the local result of a national phenomenon in Ecuador: the fracturing of dangerous criminal groups that have been thrown into chaos as the government takes down major gang leaders.
Nueva Prosperina, in Guayaquil's northwest, was previously controlled by the Los Tiguerones gang, but the capture of the group's leader in Spain in late 2024 has sparked competition to control its activities. Police blame the March deaths on a war between two factions.
William Alcivar Bautista, known as 'Black Willy', the Los Tiguerones leader apprehended last year, is wanted in Ecuador for ordering a January 2024 armed attack on a Guayaquil television station that was broadcast live. His extradition is pending.
The television station attack, among other incidents, led President Daniel Noboa to declare war on 22 gangs and their leadership. A militarization strategy that sent soldiers into prisons and onto the streets, along with an early reduction in violent death figures, helped Noboa win a full presidential term this year.
But the splintering of criminal groups as leaders are killed or captured has sent murder figures soaring, as remaining members fight to fill power vacuums and diversify their income, the interior minister, several police officials and three security experts told Reuters.
The phenomenon is similar to what occurred in Mexico during former President Felipe Calderon's bloody campaign against drug cartels starting two decades ago and in Colombia more recently as leftist rebel groups have fractured.
Noboa estimates crime in Ecuador generates some $30 billion annually in illicit earnings, roughly a quarter of the country's GDP.
In Duran, a key trafficking area near Guayaquil's ports, police said five factions that previously belonged to the Chone Killers gang are fighting to divvy up lucrative territory after the death of their leader Antonio Camacho, who went by 'Ben 10' and was killed by unknown assailants in Colombia in December. Reuters could not establish whether Camacho left Ecuador before or after Noboa's crackdown began, but he was listed by the president as a major gang leader.
The turf war in Duran has increased contract killings, as gangs hire smaller criminal groups to take out their enemies, police added.
"These splits are dangerous because of the level of internal confrontation, which drives spikes in violence," said Santiago Gavilanes, Duran's police chief.
HOMICIDES RISE IN ECUADOR
Despite ongoing military operations and states of emergency, Duran remains a key corridor for traffickers moving cocaine produced mostly in Colombia through Ecuador to the United States and Europe.
The small city ranks among the most dangerous in the world, with a homicide rate of 146 per 100,000 residents in 2024, according to the Ecuador Observatory for Organized Crime. That puts it well ahead of cities like Mexico City, which last year had a murder rate of 10 per 100,000 residents, while Rio de Janeiro state had a rate of 22.
Ecuador, once one of the region's safest countries, became a drug transit hub during the last half decade as criminal groups moved their shipping south, away from increased seizure operations along Colombia's Pacific coast, and as the COVID-19 pandemic battered already-indebted Ecuador economically.
Government officials say their strategy is systematically diminishing criminal groups, however, and has cut their revenues by $4 billion so far this year.
"We've managed to weaken structures that were growing unchecked," Interior Minister John Reimberg told Reuters. "It's not that the strategy doesn't work — it's that we're taking increasingly forceful steps to attack them."
Noboa says 16 major gang leaders, out of the 18 on his list, along with 125 mid-level members, were captured or killed in the first nine months of the year.
That includes Jose Adolfo Macias, alias Fito, the once-fugitive leader of the Los Choneros gang, who was extradited to the United States in July to face drug and weapons trafficking charges.
The government says Macias' extradition hurt Los Choneros, that no one has taken over leadership of the group out of fear of government action and that there are no signs of the gang fragmenting.
However, since Macias' July capture, murders in the port city of Manta, his main criminal stronghold, increased nearly 59% through September to 116, according to the interior ministry. Reimberg said rival gang Los Lobos is attempting to seize Los Choneros territory.
Homicides in Ecuador overall were up more than 36% in the first nine months of the year to 6,797, compared to the same period in 2024, the interior ministry says. Reimberg says more than 84% were linked to gang violence.
"Eliminating high-level members doesn't necessarily bring relief — it leads to the atomization of these groups," said Tiziano Breda, an analyst with conflict-monitoring organization ACLED. "As the number of groups to confront increases, it becomes harder to prioritize and dismantle them."
In Duran, 30% of the dead are between 12 and 24 years old, according to government figures. Fighting between gangs especially exposes small-time drug dealers, who tend to be young, police chief Gavilanes said.
CRIMINAL DIVERSIFICATION
In an echo of what's happened in Mexico, Brazil and other countries with wide narcotrafficking networks, many criminals in Ecuador are diversifying into other illicit activities, which has also fueled rivalries and stoked violence.
Multiple groups have now moved beyond drugs into selling weapons, extorting residents and running land-buying scams, all within the same territory, Gavilanes said.
Smaller criminal groups are offering services such as contract killings, drug and weapons storage and protection for larger gangs. They are also recruiting minors to sell drugs on the streets or act as informants, said security researcher Katherine Herrera.
"It seems the state is focused solely on organized crime, instead of targeting disorganized crime," Herrera said. "Disorganized crime — including gangs, individual actors and these splinter groups — has a greater impact on violence."
Amid the chaos, the gangs are reshuffling and forming new alliances. The rival Los Tiguerones factions in Guayaquil have respectively joined Los Choneros and Los Lobos, while two factions of the Chone Killers allied with Los Lobos.
Los Choneros and Los Lobos were designated as terrorist organizations by the United States in September. That allows the U.S. to go after the groups' assets and facilitates intelligence sharing, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during a recent visit to Quito.
Tensions have been high between Washington and Bogota, with the U.S. accusing Colombia of failing to stop the flow of cocaine north, but the U.S. remains friendly with the Noboa administration.
(Reporting by Yury Garcia in Guayaquil and Duran and Alexandra Valencia in Quito; Editing by Julia Symmes Cobb, Christian Plumb and Rosalba O'Brien)
