Ecuadorian police arrested 43 alleged members of Los Choneros and Los Lobos in coordinated dawn raids on Aug. 26, 2026, seizing about US$1 million in cash, roughly a tonne of cocaine and a fuel depot for drug planes. The operation came with the usual language of control and the usual machinery of force: more than 300 officers, 20 prosecutors, over 20 properties searched, and a state eager to call it a victory.
The people at the bottom of this arrangement are the ones who get hauled away, while the institutions at the top get to announce “major blows” and move on. Police commander Pablo Dávila described the operations, named Jericó and Factoría, as two major blows against two criminal structures. The raids produced 43 arrests across four provinces. Twenty-four suspects were detained in Factoría and 19 in Jericó, and 14 of them are now held in prisons around the country. Police did not publish the suspects’ names.
Who Has the Power
Factoría targeted Los Lobos in Guayas, Manabí and Los Ríos, including the La Aurora district of Daule, the road to Salitre and the canton of Durán in the Guayaquil orbit. Three of the detainees are alleged leaders of Los Lobos, and police link them directly to Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Police accuse the gang of extortion, illegal mining, contract killings and trafficking alongside Los Choneros in the cocaine trade. Los Lobos emerged from a split within Los Choneros and became its bitter rival.
The searches turned up about US$1 million in cash in a suitcase found in Durán, five vehicles holding roughly a tonne of cocaine ready for distribution, and a rural property in Durán with a fuel stockpile for light aircraft plus a plane used to move drugs toward Mexico. The raids had support from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration and the US Southern Command. That’s the hierarchy in plain sight: local police, prosecutors, and foreign security agencies working together, all under the banner of order.
What the Raids Found
Jericó targeted Los Choneros in Guayaquil, Esmeraldas and Manabí. The cell specialized in bringing marijuana across the northern border from Colombia, with drugs entering through Esmeraldas province and moving south to Guayaquil, where the gang’s network of street dealers handled distribution. The investigation behind Jericó ran for a full year and tracked about a tonne and a half of marijuana moving along the route.
Both gangs carry the United States’ highest label for crime groups, with Washington designating Los Choneros and Los Lobos as foreign terrorist organizations alongside the big cartels. Los Choneros is the older organization, with roots in Manabí province, and once ran much of the cocaine traffic leaving Ecuador’s Pacific ports. Labels like that don’t change the fact that the state’s answer is still raids, prisons and more force. The apparatus keeps expanding.
What They Call Security
The same day, the Superintendency of Banks reported finding 127 unauthorized entities taking deposits in 2025 and 2026. These phantom outfits posed as banks through social media, websites and rented offices, offering easy loans and rich investment returns. Superintendent Roberto Romero said criminal groups were posing as banks outright. One single entity allegedly defrauded its clients of close to US$50 million, and Romero estimated the informal credit circuit around these schemes may move more than US$10 billion a year, with some victims paying interest above 1,000 percent annually.
Victims include retirees chasing yields and market vendors chasing loans. Ecuador is fully dollarised, which makes deposit scams feel deceptively normal, and promised returns far above bank rates are described as the classic warning sign. The article says the practical lesson is to check any financial company against the Superintendency’s official registry before handing over a dollar. That’s the official fix: trust the registry, trust the supervisor, trust the system that keeps producing the same desperation it then polices.
The supervisor’s list grew from 19 entities in May to 61 in July and now 127. Suspicious transaction reports rose 86.79 percent between 2022 and 2026, covering US$1.2 billion to US$1.6 billion last year alone. More than 23,000 entities, from notaries to law firms, must report suspicious movements, and about 70 percent of the alerts come from the financial sector itself.
Congress this week passed a law letting the military support police without a state of emergency, and a tougher anti-gang bill is moving. Only 14 of the 43 suspects are behind bars, and the article says big raids have faded into weak cases before. The state keeps widening the net. The people below keep paying for it.