Ecuador's 'Fito': From taxi driver to drug lord to an American jail

New Straits Times

5 days ago

FORMER mechanic and taxi driver Adolfo Macias rose from a life of petty crime to the top of Ecuador's drug gang hierarchy, using extreme violence to try and submit an entire country to his will.
His reign of terror has seemingly come to an end, however, as the 45-year-old head of Ecuador's "Los Choneros" gang pleaded "not guilty" to drug and weapons charges in a New York court Monday.
In January 2024, Macias – alias "Fito" – made international headlines when he escaped from a prison in Ecuador's port city of Guayaquil – a hub for drug exports.
He had been serving a 34-year sentence for weapons possession, narcotics trafficking, organised crime and murder.
Jail did little to check Macias's ambitions: he earned his law degree behind bars and continued pulling the strings of the criminal underworld.
Videos have emerged of him holding wild prison parties, some with fireworks.
In one recording, a mariachi band and the drug lord's daughter perform a narco-glorifying ballad in the prison yard while he laughingly strokes a fighting cock.
Fito exercised "significant internal control over the prison," the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) noted in a 2022 report following a meeting with the gang leader.
His escape prompted the government to deploy the military, to the anger of Los Choneros, which unleashed a wave of violence in response.
The gang detonated car bombs, held prison guards hostage and stormed a television station during a live broadcast in several days of running battles that prompted President Daniel Noboa to declare a "state of internal armed conflict."
In June this year, a massive military and police operation dragged a bedraggled Fito from a bunker concealed under floor tiles in a luxury home in the fishing port of Manta, where he was born.
No shots were fired, and the government was quick to release photos of the overweight, dishevelled Macias appearing rather less dangerous than his deadly reputation.
On Sunday, he was put on a New York-bound plane in Guayaquil wearing shorts, a bulletproof vest and helmet, and on Monday he appeared in court. He was smiling.
Macias became leader of Los Choneros in 2020, at a time when it was transitioning away from petty crime and establishing links with the big-league Colombian and Mexican drug cartels.
"The defendant served for years as the principal leader of Los Choneros, a notoriously violent transnational criminal organization, and was a ruthless and infamous drug and firearms trafficker," US attorney Joseph Nocella said in a statement ahead of Monday's hearing.
"The defendant and his co-conspirators flooded the United States and other countries with drugs and used extreme measures of violence in their quest for power and control," he added.
Macias has also been linked to the assassination of presidential candidate and anti-corruption crusader Fernando Villavicencio at a political rally in 2023.
Villavicencio had accused Los Choneros of threatening his life. The gang is one of dozens blamed for bringing bloodshed to Ecuador, once one of the world's safest nations, but now one of its deadliest.
The country is wedged between the world's top two cocaine exporters – Colombia and Peru – and more than 70 percent of all worldwide production now passes through Ecuador's ports, according to government data.
Under Macias's leadership, Los Choneros "have leveraged their connections and sway... to become a key link in the transnational cocaine supply chain," according to an analysis by the InSight Crime think-tank.
It said the gang oversees the arrival of cocaine shipments from Colombia and uses a fleet of speedboats to send it on to Central America and Mexico, from where it is shipped to consumer markets in North America and Europe.
"With or without Fito, Ecuador will continue to be a top cocaine transit nation," said the NGO.
Macias had also escaped prison in 2013, but managed to elude authorities for only three months at the time.
On Sunday, he became the first Ecuadoran extradited by his country since the measure was written into law last year, after a referendum in which Noboa sought the approval of measures to boost his war on criminal gangs.