The Prosecutor's Office launched an operation early Thursday morning with 900 officials deployed simultaneously in five provinces of Ecuador. The result has been the arrest of 31 people, judges, prosecutors, secretaries, police, prison guides and lawyers. The State Attorney General, Diana Salazar, who directed the investigation from Quito, has named the case as metastasis because it portrays how drug trafficking “has permeated the sensitive functions of justice” in the Latin American country.
The Prosecutor's Office had 38 names on its arrest list, but seven people have managed to escape. The information about the raids was leaked before the operation and was made public on the X account, formerly Twitter, of former president Rafael Correa. When the prosecutors and agents arrived at the building of the Judicial Council, the body that administers justice in Ecuador, they were greeted by turning off the elevators. After climbing 14 floors on foot, officials found only cigarette butts and whiskey. The targets of the operation had escaped to their homes to protect their money, prosecutor Salazar told the judge in a hearing of more than six hours that explained the case.
“The term narcopolitics has been highlighted. We can see how criminal structures have permeated institutions to achieve their objectives,” said prosecutor Salazar. On Wednesday, one day before the operation, the Assembly's oversight commission, made up mostly of supporters of former President Rafael Correa, began the procedures for a political trial against Salazar. She is accused of being negligent in her duties and being selective in the cases she pursues, for example, against the brother-in-law of former president Guillermo Lasso, for alleged organized crime.
About thirty detainees are accused of organized crime. Preventive detention has been ordered for 16 people, one is under house arrest. Another 13 defendants are prohibited from leaving the country. The judge did not grant prosecutor Salazar the freezing of the accounts and assets of the former justice officials accused of corruption.
This is the biggest blow to the plot that works in the Ecuadorian Justice. The operation actually began on October 3, 2022 with a massacre inside the Cotopaxi prison, located one hour from Quito, the capital. This incident left 16 dead and 43 injured. The objective was to assassinate Leandro Norero, a drug trafficking kingpin who moved among the social elites of Guayaquil and who financed key criminal gangs for the logistics of drug trafficking of the Mexican Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel.
Norero had been in prison since May 2022. He was arrested in a money laundering operation. They found him six million dollars in cash, jewelry valued at more than four million dollars and dozens of gold bars. He then revealed his role in a criminal structure that used shell companies to launder assets. His mother, two brothers and his wife were involved in the plot. The capo was sent to the Cotopaxi prison and pulled the strings of the system to free his relatives, obtain the return of the seized assets and avoid being transferred to the maximum security prison in Guayaquil.
Each order for bank transfers, delivery of jewelry, surveillance of people and murder orders were recorded on the mobile phones he used from prison and which are now part of the evidence. On the list of those involved is the president of the Judiciary, Wilman Terán. He is being investigated for an alleged sale of sentences in favor of Norero's relatives, granted when Terán was a judge of the National Court of Justice.
Among those detained is also Pablo Ramírez, whom former president Guillermo Lasso promoted to general and entrusted him with tasks such as directing the country's prison system. Under his direction, four prison massacres occurred. One of them was in October 2022, where Norero was murdered. Lasso removed Ramírez from office after the massacre. He made him director of Police Anti-Narcotics.
Norero thanks Ramírez for the protection inside the prison in the chats today in the hands of the Prosecutor's Office. Other police officers involved leaked information about the operations that were going to be carried out against the drug trafficker, guarded his assets, destroyed and stole evidence and even served as front men, as Salazar explained at the hearing. Norero paid with money and covered the studies abroad of the police officers' children, as well as medical operations for the officers' relatives and mobile phones.
The drug trafficking boss would be responsible for at least three homicides. That of the lawyer Harrison Salcedo, defender of the criminal who heads the Los Choneros criminal gang. He also ordered the killing of journalist Gerardo Delgado, an execution he mistakenly requested, conversations reveal. The third case is that of Agustín Intriago, the mayor of the coastal city of Manta. This, according to the investigations, had links to the Norero money laundering network. The boss also ordered surveillance of the presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, and outlined a plan to assassinate the prosecutor who investigated the money laundering case.
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