On the shores of one of the arms of the sea that cross all of Guayaquil, in the Guasmo sector, which is one of the largest neighborhoods in the south of the city, there is a street with small houses built of bricks, cane, wood and roofs of zinc sheets. They are built next to each other, some even share the same wall. There are 500 meters of asphalt, cement and poverty that is officially called Pueblo Nuevo, but they know it as the Cuartel de las Feas, like the famous soap opera, Ugly Betty. From this site emerged the criminal gang that was baptized with that name and is now a military objective after the signing of a presidential decree that declared a state of war in Ecuador.
The Cuartel de las Feas has a hundred members who join together with other criminal cells that operate in surrounding neighborhoods, dedicated to kidnapping, extorting and committing all kinds of robberies, cell phones and especially motorcycles. “They steal motorcycles every week,” says one of the residents of the area. Operating in collaboration with other small gangs is a way to also cover each other's backs and expand their lairs to hide, but they all answer to a boss who is from a more powerful criminal gang, which is also a target of the military: Lagartos.
It is not unusual to see tattoos with their symbol on the walls of neighborhoods to remind other groups who is in charge there. After Tuesday, January 9, when they saw their name on the decree, those from the Cuartel de las Feas “disappeared, they hid.” Later we saw them walking through the neighborhood as if nothing had happened, but they no longer do it on motorcycles,” but as the days went by, today they have appeared again prowling the streets, “they know how to take the pulse of the military, where they are. and how to move.”
According to the presidential decree, there has been an exacerbated presence of criminal gangs since 2014, marking 22 of them as terrorists, but the Police have identified many more. The timeline begins in 1985, with the creation of the Queseros gang, in the San José neighborhood, in the city of Manta, another strategic port for drug trafficking and money laundering that belongs to the province of Manabí. .
San José is also known as the 7 Puñaladas neighborhood. It was the nineties, and the residents found dead people on the sidewalks of their homes every morning. It was there, on the shores of the Pacific, where the most dangerous gangs in Ecuador were created, which appear on the authorities' crime map, such as Los Queseros, Los Corvicheros and Los Choneros, they were boys who dedicated themselves to fishing and commerce, They went out with their wicker baskets to the streets, until one day they decided to change the sale of cheese and corviches (a typical Manabí dish) for drugs, which detonated in a fight for territory and power, although at that time the violence did not occur. It was comparable to what happens today, nor did it scale outside those perimeters.
Over time, the leaders of the Queseros and Corvicheros were assassinated and Los Choneros managed to prevail and maintain the hegemony of criminality in the country for a decade, enough time to recruit more people and empower themselves with weapons. Through the streets of 7 Puñaladas, walked Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias Rasquiña, who a few years later would become the absolute leader of Los Choneros, who gained control of the gangs that emerged to operate together, such as the Chone Killers, Tiguerones, Wolves and Lizards are all now on the Government's list of military targets.
Crime was directed by a single interlocutor, Rasquiña, who served part of a sentence for murder in the Guayaquil prison, and in this way it was achieved, for several years, that the levels of insecurity were equal to or lower than the rest. from countries in the region, until Rasquiña was released from prison and was murdered in December 2020. With the throne empty, the dispute over leadership caused massacres in prisons and fractured Los Choneros. Those who did not agree with the new leaders separated and formed new bands. There begins an explosion of criminal groups that according to the Government are the trigger for the current crisis of insecurity that the nation is experiencing, which were created from prisons, and which also served as training places for crime. To step into prisons is to be forced to choose a gang to survive inside. Thus, among all the groups identified by the Government, they estimate that they have an army of 20,000 people that keep the Ecuadorian State in check in simultaneous attacks throughout the country and that have caused an unprecedented wave of violence.
The Wolves gang is the one that has acquired the most power in the last three years. Due to connections with the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel, he has managed to diversify his crime portfolio into fields such as illegal mining. According to the Police, behind one of the largest mining operations that are in the mountainous area of the Andes in the province of Imbabura are the Lobos, who reactivated the La Merced mine, after it was closed in a military operation in 2019. , which was achieved with a state of exception to enter the area that was protected by criminals. At that time, the operation revealed that more than 7,000 people were dedicated to illegal mining and other crimes were identified such as sexual exploitation, human trafficking and weapons trafficking.
The current president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, assures that he will not negotiate with the criminals, who are asking for dialogue. He said it after one of the escapees in the last prison riots, Fabricio Colón Pico, a member of the Lobos, reappeared through a video saying that he could turn himself in if the State guarantees his life. In another video, alias Palanqueta, leader of the Lobos in the Turi prison in Cuenca, where 21 prison guides are held hostage, blames the president for the chaos in the country for not entering into a peace dialogue.
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