Jalisco And Sinaloa Cartels 'Subcontract' An Army Of Criminals In Ecuador

"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

The main reason is the sale and distribution of drugs as well as the control of Ecuadorian plazas.

The violent struggle that the Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartels have maintained extends to the navel of Latin America. There, in Ecuador, local gangs have emulated the bloodthirsty style of the Mexican drug lords, a situation that forced the government of Guillermo Lasso to decree a state of exception for the frontal combat of criminal organizations.

As in Mexico, the main reason for the rancor is the sale and distribution of drugs, as well as the control of the plazas.

To achieve their goal, the Mexican mafias have outsourced to local gangs. The Sinaloa Cartel acquired the services of Los Choneros, who have been operating criminal activities in southern Ecuador for two decades.

While Jalisco Nueva Generación has Los Lobos, Los Lagartos and Los Tiguerones as its armed arms.

Members of the Ecuadorian armed forces tell MILENIO that these four gangs maintain a strong presence in the streets of various departments of the country, where they control drug dealing, extortion, smuggling and executions.

At the same time, the authorities have dealt heavy blows to criminal structures, a success that led to another problem: drug traffickers now control the main prisons in the country, which has left dozens of inmates dead.

A sample of the warlike power of the Mexican cartels peeks behind bars: of the 40,000 inmates who live in Ecuador's prisons, 25,000 are part of the gangs that work for Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación, reveals a report from the Police Penitentiary Security Coordination.

Journalist Arturo Torres has investigated the links between the Mexican cartels and the region's mafias. In an interview with this newspaper, he comments that the local hosts of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán and Nemesio El Mencho Oseguera far exceed the 30 thousand troops that are part of the Ecuadorian Army.

First contact

In the 1990s, the Colombian cartels were at their peak and the US authorities were in check; Further north, in Mexico, the first criminal organizations were born that went from production and transfer to the operation of drug routes to the United States.

At that time, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, then leader of the Guadalajara cartel, came to Ecuador to find agreements, business, with Jorge Hugo Reyes Torres, who was already working for Pablo Escobar on the Ecuadorian route.

Thus, Reyes Torres became part of the payroll of the criminal group called "Boss pf bosses", for the transfer of tons of cocaine from Colombia, through Ecuador to Mexico and the United States.

The relationship between the bosses was such that, according to the thesis "Eradicate drug trafficking: dialectic of power and consumer society", by Professor Luis Fernando Cedeño of the Metropolitan University of Ecuador, "Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo was a baptism compadre for Jorge Hugo Reyes Torres and there is evidence: he visited the Sinaloan capo in the South Prison of Mexico City in 1990 ”.

The Ecuadorian capo had a brief but influential criminal life, in which, literally, a Cyclone sent him to jail on two occasions, obtaining his definitive freedom in June 2009.

The newspaper El Universo reported that 49 people, including active and retired police and military, were arrested on June 19, 1992. The authorities accused them of being part of a drug trafficking network headed by Jorge Hugo Reyes Torres, a businessman who was 39 years old at the time. The national police estimated his fortune to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And he claimed that he had acquired it with drug money.

“The operation was called Cyclone. With its devastating force, hundreds of police officers mobilized through different areas of the country and seized more than 50 properties, including farms, departments, warehouses, as well as dozens of vehicles, furniture, jewelry, works of art, weapons and more ”, says the Ecuadorian newspaper.

The operation resulted in a series of trials, thirteen to be exact, for the crimes of drug trafficking, murder, kidnapping and figureheads. 

At that time, Reyes Torres was found guilty of the crime of drug trafficking and sentenced to 14 years. He was barely eight years and seven months into his sentence, when he took for himself the 2 for 1 appeal, which allowed him to go free when serving half the sentence, as long as he demonstrated good behavior. He was released in 2001.

However, after 10 months of freedom, he was tried for the same crime and detained to pay the full sentence.

He was finally released on June 12, 2009, after two judges threw out his conviction.

El Chapo's washing machine

The weak and lax tax laws in Ecuador have led to the creation of hundreds of shell companies that have been used by Mexican cartels to launder their resources.

Since 2008, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán began his ties in Ecuador, particularly in the port of Manabí, from where tons of cocaine took off and shipped to the United States and Mexico.

During the so-called Trial of the Century in New York, the brothers Álex and Jorge Cifuentes, main links of the Sinaloa cartel in Colombia, revealed that they paid General Telmo Castro $ 100 for each kilo of cocaine that passed from San Lorenzo (Esmeraldas) to Quito , Guayaquil and Manta, in trucks with military logos

Those fleets anchored in Ecuadorian boats loaded with cocaine and went to Central America.

The Cifuentes brothers reported that a nephew of El Chapo, Tomás, visited Ecuador. His goal was to monitor the shipments of the illegal cargo.

In this regard, the Ecuadorian authorities responded through a statement in which the Ecuadorian Army mentioned that the military man linked to El Chapo was arrested by the police in 2009 during an anti-narcotics operation, and pointed out that he no longer belonged to the armed forces.

During the trial in New York, it was also revealed that El Chapo owned three shell companies in Ecuador: the airline Lincandisa SA, the business marketer Team Busines SA and the manager Gestorum SA.

Although the companies are currently dissolved, they were part of the 1,822 shell companies registered by the Internal Revenue Service (SRI) of Ecuador, which caused losses of 2,681 million dollars.

Mariachi in Colombia

With the latest apprehension of Joaquín Guzmán, and the life sentence handed down in a New York court, the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG) followed in the footsteps of the Guadalajara and Sinaloa mafias to extend their territory to Ecuador and take over the plaza.

Arturo Torres, editor of the Glass Code, comments that the criminal organization led by Nemesio Oseguera, El Mencho, has links with dissident groups of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who own coca plantations on the border with Ecuador.

Just on September 10 of this year, the National Police seized 9.5 tons of drugs from a Guayaquil home, owned by the CJNG.

The Código Vidrio editor remembers the arrival of Álex Izquierdo Bueno, alias El Mariachi or El Mexicano, one of the operators of the Jalisco mafia in South America, who was arrested only on January 21 of this year.

This capo was posing as a businessman dedicated to shows.

He used that facade to buy drugs in laboratories in the department of Nariño and then send them to Guatemala or Costa Rica, where other CJNG operators transferred them to Mexico and the United States.

After four months of following in his footsteps, authorities from Colombia, the United States and Ecuador detained the operator.

Prison crisis

Thus, with a strong influence on Ecuadorian routes, and with the increase in drug dealing in the streets of Ecuador, the Mexican cartels have subcontracted to local gangs to continue their disputes.

So far this year, four clashes have been reported in prisons in Ecuador that have left 119 dead and dozens more injured.

Sinaloa and Jalisco have brought blood and fire to prisons, from where criminal activities in the streets are controlled.

“What chance do you have of facing the mega gangs? It is impossible. There are barely 1,500 security guards to control 40,000 prisoners, ”says Torres.

The investigative journalist adds that cocaine trafficking has increased in the region. "That means that there are more revenues for the gangs, that is why they have the armed power, the power to buy absolutely all the officials they want, or if not eliminate them through the hired assassins," Torres details.

Milenio