Ecuador captures gang leader whose prison escape set off violence

By Francesca Regalado and Jonathan Wolfe

Ecuadorean security officials Wednesday captured the gang leader known as Fito, whose escape in 2024 set off violence across the country.

President Daniel Noboa of Ecuador announced the capture of the gang leader, José Adolfo Macías, on social media. “We have done our part to proceed with Fito’s extradition to the United States. We are awaiting their response,” Noboa wrote in Spanish.

Macías is wanted by the United States on accusations of trafficking drugs and smuggling weapons.

Macías, 45, leads the powerful Los Choneros gang, one of Ecuador’s most violent criminal organizations. The U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York indicted him this year on seven counts, including cocaine distribution.

He escaped prison in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, in January 2024, when officers who had arrived to transfer Macías to a maximum-security prison discovered he was missing from his cell. The government declared a 60-day state of emergency while they searched for him, triggering riots in several prisons, gang attacks, kidnappings and bombings across the country.

The U.S. Treasury Department placed sanctions on Macías and on Los Choneros that February.

On Wednesday, authorities found him hiding in an underground bunker in Manta, a port city on the country’s central coast about 120 miles from Guayaquil, Interior Minister John Reimberg told reporters. The military released video footage of the operation, which involved Ecuadorean police and armed forces, showing Macías shirtless and handcuffed as officers push him down to a tile floor.

In the video, officers loaded Macías into an armored vehicle and put him on an air force plane to Guayaquil. In another video, taken by The Associated Press, he is being led off the plane wearing a dark-blue shirt, gray shorts and flip-flops. He was being taken to prison, Reimberg said.