Adolfo Macias Vilamara faces charges of drug and weapons smuggling in America. drug lord the Ecuadorian gang Los Choneros, which has connections with powerful criminal organizations from Mexico and the Balkans.
This gang turned prisons in the country into command centers and operated like that, and it was also helped by alliances with Mexican cartels and the Albanian mafia, the Washington Post wrote.
Macias was re-arrested in June 2025, almost a year after he escaped from a maximum-security prison where he was serving a 34-year sentence for a series of crimes, it said. Index.hr.
As his lawyer told Reuters, Fito will appear in federal court in the United States, where he will plead not guilty to international charges of drug and weapons smuggling. He is also suspected of ordering the assassination of the presidential candidate in 2023.
He is also suspected of ordering the assassination of 2023 presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.
From tourism to monstrosity
The Los Choneros gang is accused by many of turning Ecuador from a tourist destination into one of the countries with the highest homicide rate in the region.
Today, more than 70 percent of the world's cocaine production passes through Ecuadorian ports. The country is located between Colombia and Peru, the world's two largest exporters of cocaine. In June, police located Masias in what they described as an underground bunker beneath a luxury mansion in the town of Manti.
