Homicides in Ecuador surge 800% since 2018 as gang turf wars spread
In Guayaquil, gang members move through the streets carrying assault rifles and machetes, moving cocaine that ends up in the American Midwest and the South of France. Few who defy the gangs survive — not police, prosecutors or politicians, The Wall Street Journal reported. The groups work not only from the city’s streets but from what authorities describe as their makeshift headquarters: Ecuador’s prison system. From inside the cells, the gangs have made Ecuador a major conduit in the global cocaine trade, authorities say, in a country once counted among Latin America’s most peaceful that now ranks among its most dangerous. Homicides have climbed 800% since 2018 amid turf wars, score-settling and battles with law enforcement.
Inside the facilities, gangs rather than guards hold authority. They control access to food, beds and cellphones, collecting extortion fees that generate an estimated $200 million a year, according to research group InSight Crime. Some groups have stockpiled long guns and grenade launchers, and within the walls they have built night clubs, swimming pools and cells fitted with big screen TVs and marble decoration. Leaders punish disobedience, or any attempt to leave the gang, with death.
“Whoever controls the prisons controls the streets,” said Renato Rivera, an analyst at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa has made retaking the prison system central to his security strategy. In 2024 he sent troops to wrest control from gangs allied with Mexican cartels and European crime syndicates, and he opened El Encuentro, a maximum-security prison designed for 800 inmates whose name means “The Encounter” and intended to force crime bosses to face state authority in total isolation.
“It’s a place where they’re nobody, where they can’t make phone calls, where they can’t run their criminal organizations,” Interior Minister John Reimberg said earlier this year.
Those measures have not stopped the violence or the flow of drugs north. Last year was Ecuador’s most violent on record, with a homicide rate double Colombia’s and nearly triple Mexico’s, and the U.S. has taken notice, deploying troops to participate in local drug raids and blowing up fishing vessels allegedly involved in drug running.
Military intervention and the transfer of inmates to El Encuentro created power vacuums that set off fresh waves of internal violence, rather than neutralizing the threat, said John Henry Murdy, a University of Chicago researcher studying Ecuador’s penal system. At least 206 inmates were killed last year.
“The government was able to take control for a maximum of a few months,” Murdy said. “But we can now say they failed.”
Ecuador’s experience follows a pattern seen across the region. Major criminal syndicates, including Brazil’s First Capital Command and Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, originated inside overcrowded penitentiaries and used them as bases to expand their reach. Extreme overcrowding, underfunding, corruption and the mixing of hardened criminals with minor offenders are some of the reasons Latin American prisons have become crime hubs; rather than weakening violent gangs, imprisonment can increase their power on the street, because other criminals know they will be at the gangs’ mercy if they are incarcerated.
Other Latin American governments, including those of Peru and Colombia, are promising tougher prison measures to fight organized crime, modeled on El Salvador’s prison-centric approach under Nayib Bukele, who built what is considered the world’s largest correctional facility, The Wall Street Journal reported. Peru’s Keiko Fujimori in September sent soldiers to patrol the perimeters of prisons declared under a state of emergency. Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella plans to build several new maximum-security prisons.
Many people in Ecuador applauded the decision to send soldiers into the prisons, but former military officials say the deployments have diverted resources away from boosting security on the border and at ports.
Rights groups note that military crackdowns have often worsened conditions without dislodging gang authority. At Guayaquil’s sprawling Litoral Penitentiary, troops hit prisoners on the back with sticks and cables and shot tear gas at them, an inmate told The Wall Street Journal. A lack of food and squalor fueled a tuberculosis outbreak amid widespread hunger that killed at least 800 inmates last year, said Billy Navarrete, head of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Guayaquil.
At the Litoral Penitentiary, conditions remain dire despite heavy military deployment, and gangs continue to control internal cellblock economies, extorting already poor families for basic necessities and food access.
Paul Zamora, 35, died in the Litoral in February after being jailed for drug possession. His family could not afford the extortion payments, so the ruling gang withheld his meals, and he developed severe malnutrition, tuberculosis and scabies before suffering fatal cardiac arrest.
“He’d say, ‘Dad, get me out of here, this place is hell,’” said his father, Ricardo Zamora. “We didn’t know what to do.”
Santiago Hidalgo died in July 2025, eight months after entering the Litoral. His mother, Benigna Domínguez, said he was also denied food for not paying shakedown fees. The food he did receive included spoiled broth and rotten chicken, and he drank water from the toilet tank, his ribs and collarbone showing through his skeletal body.
“He was pure bones,” said Domínguez, who tried to drop off food and medicine but was turned away by guards. “Where were the soldiers? Aren’t they supposed to be there to keep everything under control?”
A former inmate told The Wall Street Journal that when he arrived at the Litoral in 2023 as an 18-year-old, the gang leader in charge of his cellblock, known as a comandante, told him the price to enter the building was $150. Accompanied by two armed bodyguards, the boss provided the prisoner a cellphone to call his family and deposit the money into a bank account.
Inside that cellblock, virtually all inmates had cellphones. Gang members charged sky-high fees for everything from vanilla crackers to potent street drugs and sex workers, which cost $20 for five minutes. Some non-gang members who didn’t want to be with the women were still required to pay for their services. Prisoners who couldn’t pay were thrown into isolation cells or beaten.
Former officials say one of the biggest challenges of any overhaul will be stemming the deep-rooted corruption that has allowed gangs to thrive.
“Our country has so many drug traffickers with so much money that it’s really easy for them to co-opt prison staff,” said Alexandra Zumárraga, a former senior official in the prison system. “They can easily convince someone who makes $900 or $1,000 a month to smuggle in a phone for $5,000 or $10,000.”
Ecuador’s prison pipeline traces back to Jorge Luis Zambrano, leader of Los Choneros, named for the gang’s hometown of Chone in northwestern Ecuador. Arrested on murder charges in 2011, Zambrano turned Los Choneros into Ecuador’s dominant criminal outfit from behind bars. He persuaded smaller prison gangs to join an alliance that expanded the group’s national footprint, allowing him to capitalize on a booming cocaine market and eliminate rivals.
State policy inadvertently bolstered the gang’s rise. The construction of three mega-prisons in 2013 and 2014 concentrated thousands of inmates, expanding recruitment pools as the prison population surged to 38,000 in 2018, up from 11,800 in 2010 following stricter drug penalties, according to the World Prison Brief.
When prison budgets were later cut, authorities began segregating rival gang members into separate facilities to reduce deadly clashes. The move backfired instead, handing gangs exclusive territory and turning individual prisons into strongholds beyond state control. From their cells, gang members directed drug shipments, ran extortion rings, corrupted officials and orchestrated hits. In 2019, an inmate at Guayaquil’s Litoral Penitentiary brokered the assassination of Riobamba councilman Patricio Guaranga for $7,000.
“We’re professionals, brother,” the inmate said in a voice message published by prosecutors. “We’re going to work hard, as long as you pay me.” Eight days later, hit men shot Guaranga dead.
Zambrano was assassinated at a shopping mall in December 2020, just months after his release from prison, and the killing shattered the gang alliance he had forged and intensified the country’s drug conflict. A record 331 prisoners were killed in 2021 in massacres between rival factions.
Noboa’s government plans to hand back oversight of the prisons to the country’s penitentiary agency, with new cellphone-signal jammers, increased intelligence, and the separation of violent inmates from minor offenders. To address guard shortages, it is hiring retired police and military personnel, and the government says it will build another prison for 15,000 inmates, where prisoners will be required to work to cover the state’s incarceration costs, said Reimberg.