‘Los Lobos’, this is the criminal gang that has assassinated the candidate for the presidency of Ecuador, Fernando Villavicencio

2023-08-11 07:27:19

A few hours after the shooting that ended the life of Fernando Villavicencio, a candidate for the presidential elections in Ecuador, it is now known who his alleged murderers have been. This is ‘Los Lobos’, one of the most numerous criminal gangs operating in Ecuador and one of the causes of the security crisis that the country is going through, as well as the series of prison massacres where more than 400 prisoners have been murdered. since 2020 in clashes between criminal groups, which dispute internal control of Ecuador’s prisons.

In the last few hours, a short video has gone viral showing a large group of hooded and heavily armed men -with rifles and other weapons of war-, who self-identify as the criminal gang ‘Los Lobos’ and who claim the murder of the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio. In the recording, a man reads a statement with his mouth covered by a ski mask and says that the murder was committed because he received money from organized crime for the electoral campaign and did not fulfill his promise.

This voice also issues a warning about security specialist Jan Topic, another presidential candidate who, like Villavicencio, is emphatic in offering a frontal fight against organized crime and drug trafficking, to which the Government largely blames the rise of insecurity in Ecuador and homicides. “We want to make it clear to the entire Ecuadorian nation that every time corrupt politicians do not fulfill their promise that we establish when they receive our money, which is millions of dollars, to finance their campaign, they will be discharged. We, the organization ‘Los Lobos’, assume responsibility for the events that occurred this afternoon and it will be repeated when the corrupt do not comply,” they said.

For a time, ‘Los Lobos’ worked together with other smaller groups such as ‘Los Chone Killers’ or ‘Los Tiguerones’, under the control of ‘Los Choneros’. But everything changed in December 2020, when the leader of the top gang, Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias ‘Rasquiña’, was murdered in the Manta shopping center. This death left a power vacuum among criminal groups.

Three years after this event, ‘Los Lobos’ has become the second largest criminal group in Ecuador. The band has been growing by leaps and bounds and currently has approximately 8,000 members. They engage in businesses such as cocaine trafficking, contract killings, and illegal mining. They don’t care about killing using car bombs or even other types of explosives. At the Quito rally this morning, they even threw a hand grenade that did not detonate.

The bulk of this criminal violence occurs mainly on the coast of Ecuador, where one of the main drug trafficking routes passes, which has made Ecuadorian ports great springboards to send large quantities of cocaine to Europe and the United States through maritime trade. Joined.

Its power goes beyond having managed to gain control of the streets, since the base of its operations is found within the country’s prisons. Pavilion number 9 of the Litoral Penitentiary is, without a doubt, one of his great acquisitions. In the year 2021, they had a great influence within several prison riots that resulted in more than 300 inmates being killed.

In addition, it boasts international alliances with the Jalisco cartel or commercial relations with criminal groups in Eastern Europe, mainly Albanians. They have also been linked in the past to the 48th Front, a dissident group of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).