Explosive revelations from the country’s attorney general showed links between criminals and authorities, something that may have sparked the crisis. It was “like kicking the hornet’s nest,” said one expert.

By Annie Correal

Just weeks before chaos broke out in Ecuador with the escape of two criminal leaders, prison riots and a brief siege of a television station, the country’s attorney general had begun a major operation to root out narco-corruption from the highest levels of government.

The investigation, known as the “Metastasis Case,” led to raids throughout Ecuador and led to more than 30 arrests.

Among the defendants were judges who were charged with rulings favorable to leaders of criminal organizations, police officers who allegedly manipulated evidence and delivered weapons to prisons, and even the former director of the prison authority, who was accused of giving special treatment to a powerful drug trafficker.

They had been implicated by text conversations and call logs taken from the cellphones of a drug dealer who was murdered in prison.

When Diana Salazar, the attorney general, announced the charges last month, she indicated that the investigation had revealed the embeddedness of criminal groups in Ecuadorian institutions. He also warned that in the following days there could be “an escalation of violence” and said that the executive branch was already on alert.

This week, his prediction came true.

Interviews with security experts and intelligence sources reveal what could have triggered the violence in Ecuador this week , which was so intense that it led the president, Daniel Noboa, to declare war on the gangs and impose a state of emergency.

According to those interviewed, the attorney general’s investigation played a fundamental role.

“Metastasis is the starting point,” said Mario Pazmiño, a retired colonel and former intelligence director of the Ecuadorian army who serves as an independent security analyst.

The operatives pressured Noboa, who took office in November and promised to confront the gangs and clean up the prison system, to take concrete steps, Pazmiño said.

The president assured that considerable changes were coming. Although not publicly announced, authorities said the changes included the transfer of several powerful criminal gang leaders to a maximum security facility known as La Roca in Guayaquil, a major coastal city.

However, gang leaders learned of the plan before it was carried out, most likely due to a government leak, according to authorities. And on Sunday, Adolfo Macías, who heads a gang known as the Choneros and is considered by far the most powerful gang leader in Ecuador, disappeared from his cell.

While clashes between inmates and guards were reported throughout the country, another criminal leader, Fabricio Colón Pico, who runs Los Lobos, escaped from a penitentiary in the city of Riobamba on Tuesday morning.

Experts said gang leaders wanted to avoid being sent to La Roca because security would be stricter there and they would most likely lose access to electronic devices such as cell phones. The ringleaders also feared death at the hands of their rivals on The Rock if they were housed together.

“That puts everyone’s life at risk,” Pazmiño commented. “There is the breaking point.”

In response to the scheduled transfer, experts said that leaders most likely gave the order — from the prisons that serve as their command center — for the gang members to counterattack.

And so, on Tuesday, Ecuadorians experienced the worst violence they have witnessed in years, even as gang clashes have already convulsed a once peaceful country. In several prisons, inmates took guards and staff members hostage. A video on social media showed guards being held at knifepoint.

In towns and cities there were kidnappings of police officers, burning of vehicles and detonation of explosives.

The greatest violence occurred in Guayaquil, where armed men not only broke into the TC Television studio during a broadcast, but also into several hospitals and opened fire near at least one school.

During the riots, at least 11 people died, according to authorities, most of them in Guayaquil, and almost 200 members of the prison staff were taken hostage.

The attorney general’s revelations—and Noboa’s subsequent plan to transfer gang leaders—had sparked intense outrage.

“Operation Metastasis is like kicking the hornet’s nest,” said Gustavo Flores-Macías, professor of public policy and government at Cornell University specializing in Latin America.

Before the operation, gang leaders seemed to have achieved a state of “balance,” he said, in which they felt they could run their lucrative criminal organizations even behind bars, with the cooperation of authorities.

“Let’s say the gangs operate under a certain level of impunity and we’ll say they’re pretty happy with it,” Flores-Macías said. “What Metastasis is doing is disturbing this balance that exists and that allows them to continue doing business. So in this criminal underworld there is a reaction that occurs in the form of these quite violent and spectacular actions.”

Salazar’s office responded by saying they were not granting interviews due to the ongoing security situation.

The violence unleashed by the gangs was met with force. On Tuesday afternoon, Noboa took the extraordinary measure of declaring an “internal armed conflict” with which he deployed the army to combat twenty gangs in the country.

In the days after the declaration, authorities said, police and armed forces had killed five people involved in gang-related violence and arrested more than 850.

The U.S. State Department on Thursday issued a statement saying security, military and government officials would visit Ecuador to support its fight against what the department called “shocking levels of violence and terrorism at the hands of terrorist elements.” “narcocriminals.”

A person who works in Ecuador’s intelligence sector, who offered comment on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said Thursday that gang leaders appeared to have been placated by the fierce response to this week’s violence. and they had ordered that calm be established in the streets and prisons.

Macías and Colón, the gang leaders, were still at large.

Colón, who had been detained a week before escaping and whom Salazar accused of planning to kill her, posted a video Thursday on X , the platform formerly known as Twitter. Dressed in a hoodie and a hat, he said he had only escaped because he believed he would be killed if he remained imprisoned.

He told the president that he would surrender if they could guarantee his safety. In a radio interview, Noboa said he would not offer any such deal.

Salazar, who is the first Black person to be Ecuador’s attorney general, took office in 2019. The following year he prosecuted a former president, Rafael Correa, for corruption crimes and after he was convicted, recommended that he be sentenced to eight years in prison, the maximum sentence.

In 2022, it began its last investigation, after the death of Leandro Norero, a gang leader.

Norero was the founder of Los Chone Killers and had become one of the most powerful drug traffickers and financiers in the country, establishing ties with Mexico’s Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel, the prosecutor said.

He was serving a sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering when he died in a prison massacre.

At the time of his death, according to prison authorities and experts, he was trying to unite several rival gangs into a cartel.

Salazar said he had also been rewarding judges, police officers, guards and others who helped him and his associates with apartments, cars, cash and prostitutes.

Among the people exposed by Norero’s telephone records was Pablo Ramírez, who was the director of the prison authority and who is accused of providing preferential treatment to Norero. Ramírez has denied having had any contact with Norero.

Wilmer Terán, president of the Judicial Council and former magistrate in the country’s highest court, was also prosecuted. Terán, whose council supervises and disciplines judges and prosecutors, has denied having been part of Norero’s extensive network of favors. The Judicial Council has supported him and has described Salazar’s operation as a smear campaign.

The day before the operation was to be carried out, legislators believed to be close to former President Correa announced a plan to investigate Salazar, ensuring that she was selective with the cases she chose.

At about the same time, Correa posted a message on X warning of an imminent operation, a message that Salazar would later say had alerted several of the officials involved, who evaded capture in the raids.

“The term narcopolitics in Ecuador has been evidenced,” Salazar said when he announced the arrests that had been made.

In a hearing lasting several hours, Salazar described the way drug traffickers had penetrated Ecuador’s political and prison system.

The transcripts of the cell phone evidence consisted of 15,000 pages.