2024-01-10 06:01:20
Bearded, lips pursed, gaze fixed and the legend “WANTED” on his face. Adolfo Macías, alias ‘Fito’, is now the most dangerous fugitive in Ecuador after his escape from prison, from where he commanded the main criminal gang in a country mired in violence.
Little else is known about the leader of ‘Los Choneros’ other than his humble past as a taxi driver, in addition to his ability to break the law, which led him to be classified by the Government as a “criminal with extremely dangerous characteristics.”
The public force activated a plan to find the head of a narco-criminal gang that emerged in the 1990s in the coastal province of Manabí (southwest), strategic for drug trafficking to the United States and Europe.
The Government believes that he could have escaped “hours before” the police intervention in the Guayaquil Regional Prison (southwest), where he was considered the boss.
In the recording he appears greeting, laughing and caressing a fighting rooster.
‘Fito’ exercised “significant internal control of the penitentiary center,” said the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in a 2022 report made after a meeting with the capo.
Daniel Noboa’s government announced a reward for José Adolfo Macías Villamar, alias #Issueleader of the criminal organization ‘Los Ch0neros’, and by Colón pic.twitter.com/006HxKhsKv
— Ecuador Al Día 365 (@ecuadoraldia365) January 9, 2024
The organization added that Macías and Junior Roldán, another leader of ‘Los Choneros’, murdered last year in Colombia, had “differential and preferential treatment by the” prison authorities.
Rise and fragmentation
In the world of ‘Fito’ the saying applies: a dead king is a king. His rise to the top of the band, made up of about 8,000 people, was due to the successive deaths of his predecessors.
The new boss graduated as a lawyer in prison, where he was serving a 34-year sentence for the crimes of weapons possession, drug trafficking, organized crime and murder.
The alarms about his unknown whereabouts went off on Sunday, when uniformed officers in an operation noticed his absence. Photo: @eluniversocom | Photo: @eluniversocom
His rise to the criminal leadership was accompanied by the fragmentation of the gang, which until the death of ‘Rasquiña’ had united a good part of smaller organizations.
The study center points out that Los Choneros “have progressively lost power to an alliance led by Los Lobos,” whose leader in Quito also escaped from a prison in Riobamba (south) on Tuesday.
The Choneros were first dedicated to traditional crime with assaults on the high seas, they achieved links with Colombian and then Mexican drug traffickers. They currently have links with the Sinaloa cartels, the Gulf Clan (the largest cocaine exporter in the world) and Balkan organizations, according to the Ecuadorian Organized Crime Observatory.
A virtual army
On social networks, Los Choneros present themselves as Robin Hood-style do-gooders and produce their own video clips that praise drug trafficking. They threaten journalists and issue warnings to other bands with urban rhythms.
“Active, Choneros, here we are lions. With Uncle Fito, as expected, controlling the neighborhood, here we are bosses,” they say in one of his many songs.
There are moments of tension in Ecuador. | Photo: AFP
The justice system has not convicted Fito for that crime, but the government of then-president Guillermo Lasso (2021-2023) ordered his transfer to a maximum security prison, in a spectacular operation by public forces that sparked protests by inmates.
‘Fito’ returned shortly after to his fiefdom of the Guayaquil Regional Prison through legal resources.
Now again his photograph with the legend “WANTED” is circulating around Ecuador, which is bleeding amid clashes unleashed after his escape.
In 2013 he had already escaped, but his journey lasted just three months.
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