The American prosecution accused in April “Fito” of cocaine and weapon trafficking. John Durham, a prosecutor of a Brooklyn court, then described him as “a ruthless leader and a prolific drug trafficker on behalf of a violent transnational criminal organization”.
The drug baron “left the Center for Deprivation of Liberty La Roca”, kept by police and soldiers, “as part of an extradition process,” said penitentiary authority (SNAI), in a message sent to journalists.
From his cell in a high-security prison, “Fito” had agreed last week to be extradited to the United States during a videoconference audience.
He thus became the first Equatorian to be extradited by his own country since the reinstatement in Ecuador of this procedure by referendum in 2024, a measure defended by the Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa in his fight against organized crime.
“We send him with great pleasure to respond to American law,” Noboa said in an interview with CNN.
Choneros gang
“Fito” had escaped in January 2024 from the Penitentiary Center of Guayaquil (southwest of the Ecuador) where he had been serving since 2011 a sentence of 34 years’ imprisonment for organized crime, drug trafficking and murder.
Head of one of the country’s main gangs, the Choneros, which reigns in particular on cocaine traffic, “Fito” was associated with the assassination in August 2023 of one of the main candidates for the Ecuadorian presidential election, Fernando Villavicencio.
Former taxi driver, he had become the number one public enemy in Ecuador, the authorities designating him as a “criminal with extremely dangerous characteristics”.
His escape had sparked an unprecedented wave of violence in the country, killing dozens of dead and generating mutinies in several prisons, street fights triggered by gangs and a hostage -taking on a television set.
Daniel Noboa then declared the country in “internal armed conflict” and deployed the army to try to neutralize the twenty criminal groups involved.
Because of its situation between Colombia and Peru – the world’s largest producing countries of cocaine – and its strategic ports on the Pacific, Ecuador has become in recent years the scene of violent clashes for control of territories intended for the delivery of cocaine to the United States and Europe.
The choneros gang has links with the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, the Del Golfo clan in Colombia, the largest exporter of cocaine in the world, and the Balkan mafias, according to the Ecuadorian observatory of organized crime.
More than 70% of all the cocaine produced in the world now transits by the ports of the Ecuador. In 2024, the country entered a record of 294 tonnes of drugs, mainly cocaine.
