Ecuador’s most dangerous criminal Fito escapes from prison International

The Ecuadorian government does not know when the country’s most dangerous criminal, Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, aka Fito, escaped from a Guayaquil prison. It took him 15 hours to discover that the leader of the bloodthirsty criminal gang, Los Choneros, the operational arm of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, had escaped. “Today, together with the police armed forces, we realized the absence of one of the inmates operating in this social rehabilitation center,” reported Police Commander, Cesar Zapata.

These statements were made on the way out of an emergency meeting of the Security Council convened by the President. The Guayaquil penitentiary complex, which includes 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 what happens in prisons, said it was for arms control operations. Another instruction was also followed, to eliminate prison plugs (switches), EL PAÍS learned from a police source. In early December, President Daniel Noboa had already warned in an interview that he should start with the basics, “not to put the plug on a gang leader.” According to the president, Fito is in the cell he was in. Four plugs, “It has more plugs than a hotel room.”

An operation to control contraband was conducted and “cell phones, plugs, knives and other evidence were seized,” the commander said, and it was there that “the absence of one of the inmates was noted.”, he added, and of the prison complex. Searches are ongoing inside, while the State Prosecutor’s Office has launched an ex officio investigation and on-site action is being taken.

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

Fito’s rise to the leadership of Los Choneros followed the assassination of Jorge Luis Zambreno, alias Raskina, who maintained the organization’s dominance in Ecuador’s coastal province of Manabí in the 1980s. Choneros gained fame as hitmen, although over time they expanded their crimes to drug trafficking, micro-trafficking, extortion and robbery. According to police information, he was the first to establish links with foreign cartels. After Raski’s crime, Los Choneros split, and trusted men took over the leadership, forming new cells: Los Aguilas and Los Fatales, the latter following Macias.

On August 12, Fito was transferred to La Rocca, which required about 4,000 police and military personnel, and which later led to prison riots that demanded he return to his castle in the region, something that happened. Thanks to the sentence of a judge who ordered his transfer to prison from where he ordered all operations.

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