Ecuador’s most dangerous criminal Fito escaped from prison. international

The Ecuadorian government does not know when the country’s most dangerous criminal, Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias Fito, escaped from Guayaquil prison. It took him 15 hours to recognize that the leader of bloodthirsty criminal gang Los Choneros, the operational arm of the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel, had fled. “Today the police, together with the armed forces, realized the absence of one of the prisoners living in this social rehabilitation center,” said César Zapata, police commander.

These statements were made while leaving the emergency meeting of the Security Council called by the President. The Guayaquil prison complex, which consists of five prisons where more than 12,000 people are deprived of liberty, woke up this Sunday, January 7, with a strong police and military contingent. A brief statement from SNAI, the government body responsible for incidents in prisons, said it was for an arms control campaign. Another instruction was also followed, to dismantle the prison’s plug (switch), EL PAÍS learned from a police source. In early December, President Daniel Noboa had already warned in an interview that they should start with the basics, “not curbing the gang leader.” The cell that Fito was in had four plugs, according to the president, “it has more plugs than a hotel room.”

An operation to control contraband was carried out and “cell phones, plugs, knives and other evidence found were confiscated,” the commander said, and it was here that “the absence of one of the prisoners was noticed”. ” “, he said, and searches are continuing inside the prison complex, while the State Prosecutor’s Office has launched an ex officio investigation and procedures are being carried out on site.

Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias Fito, 44 years old, faces 14 judicial proceedings for various crimes including robbery, organized crime, weapons possession and murder, which add up to a maximum prison sentence of 34 years, of which he has been held in Guayaquil for 12 years . Regional Jail… This is not the first time he has escaped. In February 2013, Fito and 15 other prisoners from the Los Choneros gang, including the group’s leader, Jorge Luis Zambrano, escaped from a maximum security prison called La Roca, which is within the same prison complex. He was the country’s most wanted criminal for 10 months, until the police found him.

Fito’s rise to the leadership of Los Choneros followed the assassination of Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias Rasquina, who maintained hegemony over the organization that had its origins in Manabí, a province on the coast of Ecuador in the 1980s. Choneros gained fame as a hitman, although over time he expanded his crimes to drug trafficking, micro-trafficking, extortion, and robberies. According to police information, he was the first person to establish links with foreign cartels. After the Rusquina crime, Los Choneros split up, and trusted people took over leadership, forming new cells: Los Águilas and Los Fatales, who later began to follow Macías.

On 12 August, Fito was transferred to La Roca in an operation that required approximately 4,000 police and military personnel, and which later led to riots in the prison demanding that he be returned to the regional fortress. , something that ended thanks to the sentence of a judge, who ordered him to be transferred back to prison, from where he took command of all operations.

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