Ecuador’s ruling Acción Democrática Nacional bloc presented the Ley Antimafias to the National Assembly on 2 June 2026, and the bill would create a new standalone crime of membership in a criminal organization under Article 369-A of the COIP, Ecuador’s criminal code. The proposal would punish that membership with 10 to 22 years in prison. The machinery of punishment is moving again, this time with a fresh legal label and a wider net.
Who Holds the Pen
Assembly vice president Mishel Mancheno sponsored the bill and delivered it to Assembly president Niels Olsen. That’s where the power sits: in the hands of officials who draft the rules, hand them across polished desks, and decide which bodies get caged under them. The proposal has not been approved yet. It still must clear qualification, committee review and two plenary debates before it can become law.
The bill sets three penalty tiers. Basic membership would carry 10 to 13 years in prison. Operational roles would face 13 to 16 years. Organizers, financiers and those exercising territorial command would receive 16 to 22 years. The current Article 369 already punishes organized crime, sentencing leaders to 22 to 26 years and collaborators to 10 to 13 years. The state’s answer to criminal networks is more years, more categories, more cages.
What the Bill Adds
The proposal also creates new crimes of recruitment and providing infrastructure to criminal organizations. It would raise penalties for hydrocarbon theft. It would tighten pretrial detention rules in Article 534 of the COIP, allow asset forfeiture, known in Ecuador as extinción de dominio, based on membership alone, and permit the early sale of seized goods before a final conviction. That means punishment can start before guilt is fully settled, while property can be stripped and sold while the case is still moving through the apparatus.
Lawyers convicted of organized crime or money laundering would be permanently disbarred under the bill. The legislation is aimed at organized crime groups tied to drug trafficking and prison gang violence, which have repeatedly shaken the country’s penitentiary system. The bill frames itself as order, but it expands the state’s reach into detention, property, and professional life all at once.
Who Pays for “Security”
The people at the bottom are the ones who pay first. Prisoners face longer pretrial detention. Families face the loss of property through extinción de dominio. Anyone accused of membership alone could be swept into a system that treats association as enough to justify years behind bars. The bill’s language draws a wider circle around punishment, then calls it control.
No grassroots response appears in the proposal itself. No mutual aid, no horizontal organizing, no community defense. Just the familiar top-down script: officials write, assemblies debate, and the punished absorb the cost. The bill remains pending, but its shape is already clear. More prison time. More seizure. More power concentrated in the hands of the state that claims it’s restoring order.