José Adolfo Macías, known as Fito, escaped twice before authorities in the South American country apprehended him. He appeared in a music video from prison.
A man in handcuffs walking down a jet stairway used for illustration purpose
José Adolfo Macías escaped from prison in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, in January 2024, prompting the government to declare a 60-day state of emergency.Credit…Joffre Flores/Associated Press
Ecuador’s most powerful gang leader, whose escape from prison set off a chain of deadly violence across that country last year, was arraigned on drug trafficking and weapons smuggling charges in Brooklyn on Monday.
The leader, José Adolfo Macías, known as Fito, is the head of Los Choneros, a gang that has helped establish a powerful drug-trafficking industry in Ecuador by infiltrating the ranks of government and terrorizing ordinary Ecuadoreans.
Mr. Macías, 45, was captured by Ecuadorean authorities in June and extradited to the United States on Sunday. He had escaped prison in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, in January 2024, prompting the government to declare a 60-day state of emergency while the authorities searched for him.
Mr. Macías, with a graying beard and wearing a green shirt, listened to the court proceedings on Monday through an interpreter. He pleaded not guilty. He is due back in court on Sept. 19 and faces up to life in prison if convicted.
Ecuador has seen an explosion of violence related to drug trafficking. Since 2020, Los Choneros has played a central role in the unrest, carrying out kidnappings, killing citizens and taking over prisons, aided by public corruption, according to federal prosecutors.
Prosecutors say that Mr. Macías, who became the leader of Los Choneros in 2020, has tapped a sprawling criminal network, including groups like the Sinaloa Cartel, to facilitate the movement of tons of cocaine from South America to Mexico, and eventually to the United States. In April, prosecutors announced Mr. Macías’s indictment in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on charges of international drug and weapons smuggling.
“His reach was far and wide,” Chand Edwards-Balfour, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in court on Monday.
Ecuador, unlike its neighbor Colombia, had not been a hotbed for gang- and drug-related violence until relatively recently. Within the last decade, local groups began partnering with Mexican and Albanian cartels to produce and distribute large quantities of cocaine, helping make Ecuador the top exporter of the drug to Europe. The gangs have unleashed violence in a country that was once held up as an outlier in an unsettled region. Political assassinations, kidnappings and killings of journalists and civilians have been linked to Los Choneros.
Ecuador’s prison system, from which Mr. Macías continued to run the gang’s operations, has been an incubator of much of the violence, experts say. The country’s prison population soared in response to policies that cracked down on low-level drug offenders and kept defendants in jail until trial. But those efforts backfired by giving the gangs fertile ground for recruitment.
Mr. Macías is not the first international drug lord to be received and prosecuted in Brooklyn this year. Rafael Caro Quintero, the Mexican drug lord notorious for his role in the 1985 murder of a D.E.A. agent, was expelled from Mexico and arraigned in Brooklyn on drug trafficking charges in February.
Like the drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, Mr. Macías escaped twice from prison before his eventual extradition. He was arrested on drug trafficking charges in Ecuador in 2011 and escaped in 2013, while serving a 34-year prison sentence. He was recaptured a few months later.
According to prosecutors, Mr. Macías bribed prison officials to let inmates control the prison system, enjoying parties with mariachi bands and fireworks. In 2023, he appeared in a music video, filmed partly in the prison, that taunts the government for its inability to curtail the gangs and glorifies Mr. Macías. The gang leader is shown caressing a rooster in the prison, while his daughter rides a horse on a ranch and sings.
His escape last year, which took place just as officials were set to transfer him to a maximum-security prison — and weeks after Ecuador’s top prosecutor launched a sweeping effort to root out widespread corruption that has protected the gangs — set off more violence. Riots erupted in several prisons, with inmates taking nearly 200 guards hostage, and there were bombings and more kidnappings throughout the country.
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Mr. Macías was found by Ecuadorean authorities hiding in a luxury villa in Manta, a port city about 120 miles from Guayaquil, federal prosecutors said.
In response to the escalating violence, Daniel Noboa, Ecuador’s president, has aggressively cracked down on the gangs, drawing comparisons to Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, as well as accusations of authoritarianism. Mr. Noboa was invited to President Trump’s second inauguration and met with him at Mar-a-Lago.
But Mr. Noboa, who won re-election in April, has struggled to curtail the violence despite his heavy-handed tactics. Homicides declined early in his presidency but have risen more recently, prompting some Ecuadoreans to ask for an even tougher crackdown on the gangs.
Source:New York Times
