José Adolfo Macias, “Fito”, leader of one of Ecuador's biggest gangs, Los Choneros, was included in the reward program to capture the country's most wanted criminals after escaping from prison where he was serving a 34-year sentence.
The “131 Together for Security” program of the Ecuadorian National Police and Armed Forces does not specify the amount the whistleblower would receive for information leading to Fito's recapture. Last Sunday (7), he was not found in his cell when he was supposed to be transferred to a maximum security prison.
The government did not detail how the fugitive, one of the country's most dangerous prisoners after being sentenced in 2011 to 34 years in prison for crimes including drug trafficking, murder and organized crime, escaped.
However, according to the president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, “in the last two governments”, the detainee “was in and out of prison whenever he wanted”.
“The moment he discovered, through leaked information, that we were going to move the leaders (of criminal groups) from prisons that are not maximum security, and that we were going to put them in isolated places, he fled,” said the chief de Estado in an interview with a radio station this Wednesday (10).
The Public Ministry of Ecuador filed charges on Monday (8) against two prison employees, allegedly involved in Fito's escape from the Guayaquil Regional Penitentiary, controlled by the criminal group Los Choneros.
The cell had a television, an internet modem and was decorated with several paintings, as was seen in an intervention carried out last year by the police and the Armed Forces to seize weapons and explosives that were kept by criminal gangs in Ecuadorian prisons.
The gang leader's escape came at a time when President Daniel Noboa's government was trying to initiate a tough policy against organized crime to isolate its leaders until two new maximum security prisons were built.
This would be the second time that Fito disrespected Ecuador's penitentiary system, having already done so in 2013, when he escaped from La Roca prison, also located in Guayaquil, although he was recaptured two months later.
Los Choneros emerged in the 1990s in Chone, a city in the coastal province of Manabí, and gradually gained power in drug trafficking routes, particularly in transiting cocaine from Colombia to be transported by sea to cartels in Mexico, according to the police.
The organization operates in drug trafficking, extortion, contract killings, weapons trafficking, among other crimes.
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