This Wednesday the government of Donald Trump added Los Tiguerones to its extensive list of terrorist organizations, as confirmed by the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, during his visit to Ecuador.
“Today we will designate as a Foreign Terrorist Organization -(FTO, for its acronym in English)- a group known as Los Tiguerones and this comes immediately after, in July, we designated three others, including Los Lobos and Los Choneros,” Rubio said from Quito.
A decision that the head of U.S. diplomacy justified because these are not “normal” criminal groups, but “violent and bloodthirsty terrorist organizations”.
“We have to make sure to keep pursuing them,” the U.S. Secretary of State pointed out regarding the decision to add the Ecuador-based gang to the FTO list.
They are linked not only to drug trafficking and other illicit activities, but also to numerous attacks against civilians, law enforcement agents, and journalists, including the takeover of the TC Televisión channel during a live broadcast in January 2024.
One of the multiple criminal actions carried out by the group whose top leader is William Joffre Alcívar Bautista, alias “Negro Willy” or “Willy”, a former prison guard who is free after being detained in Spain and whose extradition to Ecuador was not carried out.
The main architect for how, in just a few years, Los Tiguerones became one of the most dangerous and influential criminal groups in Ecuador and a key link in the transnational cocaine trafficking, as reported by the organized crime foundation Insight Crime.
The group was born in the late 2010s in Guayaquil as a faction of the prison gang Los Choneros, but its operations center is in Esmeraldas, a city located in the northeast of Ecuadorian territory.
The gang’s independence was finalized in 2020, after the murder of Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias “Rasquiña” or “JL”, triggered the fragmentation of Los Choneros, when they joined a coalition of former factions of the latter gang, known as Nueva Generación, along with Los Lobos and Los Chone Killers, among others.
During their time with Nueva Generación, Los Tiguerones participated in one of the worst massacres in Ecuador’s history, when at least 119 inmates were killed in a failed attempt to take control of a block still controlled by Los Choneros in the Litoral prison, in Guayaquil
This was followed by another change of side, resuming their association with Los Choneros, from which point a dispute over Los Lobos’ territory began, especially in Esmeraldas, making this city one of the most violent in the country with episodes such as various massacres, including that of nine fishermen in April 2023.
But Los Tiguerones have also been involved in some of the best-known cases of the use of terrorist tactics inside prisons to pressure the government. Thus, in 2022, the group, along with Los Lobos, allegedly participated in a wave of attacks that included car bombs and bodies displayed on bridges.
One of the many steps marked by brutality in the gang’s timeline that, according to Insight Crime, has built a fearsome reputation as one of Ecuador’s most aggressive criminal groups, while establishing an extensive criminal portfolio, which includes drug microtrafficking, extortion, robbery, and providing services for transnational drug trafficking organizations.
At the beginning of 2024, the administration of President Daniel Noboa declared Los Tiguerones and other gangs “terrorist groups,” stating that the country was in a state of “internal armed conflict.”
