Ecuador’s biggest drug trafficker, Adolfo Macias, nicknamed “Fito”, agreed on Friday July 11, to be extradited to the United States, where the prosecution accuses him of cocaine and weapons traffic, announced the national court of justice of the South American country.
Considered one of the most dangerous criminals of Ecuador, “Fito” had been arrested at the end of June in his hometown of Manta, 350 km southwest of Quito, the capital, after a year and a half of the run. He had escaped in January 2024 from the Penitentiary Center of Guayaquil, on which he had the grip and where he had been serving since 2011 a sentence of thirty-four years of imprisonment for organized crime, drug trafficking and murder.
Dressed in the orange uniform of the prisoners and the carved beard, “Fito” attended the hearing on Friday from his cell, in videoconference, and answered the judge: “Yes, I accept [l’extradition]. » This decision opens the way to its transfer. “Once extradition (…) accepted, the procedure for its transfer to the United States will take its course ”said the court in a press release.
Associated with the assassination of a presidential candidate
The president of the Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, must now order the delivery of “FITO” to the American justice. Adolfo Macias will become the first Equatorian to be extradited since the restoration in this country of this procedure by referendum in 2024, a measure defended by Daniel Noboa in his fight against organized crime.
Head of one of the country’s main gangs, the choneros, which reigns in particular on cocaine trafficking, « Fito “was associated with the assassination, in August 2023, of one of the main candidates for the Ecuadorian presidential election, Fernando Villavicencio.
His escape in early 2024, had sparked an unprecedented wave of violence in the country, killing dozens of deaths and generating mutinies in several prisons as well as street fights triggered by gangs. Daniel Noboa then declared the country in “Internal armed conflict” And deployed the army to try to neutralize the twenty criminal groups involved.
Due to its situation between Colombia and Peru-the world’s largest producing countries in cocaine-and its strategic ports on the Pacific, Ecuador has become in recent years the theater of violent clashes for the control of territories intended for the delivery of cocaine, the main destinations of which are the United States and Europe.