The mayor of Playas and the narco's checks

On the night of January 7, 2026, an armed group killed three men on a sports field in Mocolí, in Samborondón; one of them was alias Marino, a leader of Los Lagartos. Over the following days, Boscán & La Moni followed the trail of the circle of young people around the drug trafficker. One of the names that reached them was Eduardo Freire, boyfriend of content creator Wendy Landa.

Freire had a company set up in 2023 with 800 dollars in capital. According to the press report Boscán read on air, that company won a USD 607,301 contract at Hidroplayas, the Playas municipality's public water company: it was the only bidder, and the contract was signed four days later. The name Hidroplayas clicked for Boscán: years earlier, alias Marino had won a contract at that same municipal company, when he was already one of the most wanted men in the country.

Boscán & La Moni spent the weekend of January 17 and 18 going through Playas, with help from people in the canton who sent them information. Before they got to the mayor, odd details surfaced: a contract with a company that until shortly before had been owned by a municipal employee, and another worth about USD 300,000 for food kits for families in need, whose administrator resigned halfway through the contract and had to be replaced. On the morning of Monday the 19th they told what they had found.

Mayor

Gilmar Gabriel Balladares Espinoza won the mayor's office of General Villamil Playas on February 5, 2023, with the Pachakutik movement and took office on May 14 of that year, for the 2023-2027 term. Playas is about forty minutes from Guayaquil and very close to the port of Posorja.

The first contract that jumped out at them was the rental of road-building equipment to regrade roads in several parts of the canton. Two companies entered the bidding, Compañía de Transporte Edison Moreira and Max Supply S.A., with almost identical prices. Max Supply won, for about USD 340,000, a large contract for a municipality the size of Playas. Boscán said on air that the process later fell through.

The owner of Max Supply is Luis Alexander García Holguín. To understand who he was, Boscán & La Moni reconstructed the mayor's circle. According to the Civil Registry, Balladares is single, but he lives with María Magdalena Barberán Zambrano, whom he presents as his wife. Her stepfather is Sandro Miguel Holguín Cedeño, and García Holguín is Holguín's nephew. In other words, the contract went to the nephew of the mayor's de facto father-in-law.

None of these ties is a legal kinship: the mayor is not married to his partner, and Holguín is not married to her mother either. Boscán pointed it out on air with irony: legally, then, no one can fault the mayor for giving a contract to his father-in-law's nephew.

Then Redieg S.A. appears, and with it the big amounts. In November 2023 the mayor awarded it, directly and under an emergency declaration, the cleanup and dredging of the Arenas River, a process that had been posted at USD 219,000. In January 2024 came the biggest contract: USD 2.5 million, also under emergency procedures, to build and fit out shelters for natural disasters. Boscán showed on air the document bearing Balladares's signature.

Redieg is registered to Sandro Holguín, the stepfather of the mayor's partner. According to Primicias, Holguín bought all the shares on April 17, 2024, and became its manager and executive president; the newspaper Extra was already describing him as the owner in June of that year and added that he had not declared those shares to the Comptroller General's Office. At the same time, Holguín was on the municipal payroll: since October 2023 he had been a supervisor at the very municipality that was hiring his company.

The last two contracts came in September and October 2024, when alias Boris was already in prison and his name had already been linked to Holguín's. In 2025, according to Primicias, Redieg received no new awards.

When they looked up Holguín in the Superintendency of Companies, Boscán & La Moni found that he had other companies. One of them, Construyendoplayas Inc. S.A., was already in liquidation. It had been incorporated in March 2023, weeks after the election, with five partners. Four worked at the municipality, Holguín among them. The fifth was Borys Alexi Párraga Figueroa.

Boris

He is alias Boris, identified as the drug czar of Los Choneros. He was captured on June 12, 2024, at a birthday party in El Empalme, the so-called narco-party, and a judge ordered him held in pretrial detention for illegal possession of weapons. Boscán showed on air the news report of his sentencing.

Construyendoplayas also had contracts with the municipality. In September 2023 it obtained a minor-value contract, USD 6,944, for disposable breakfast containers; it was signed by the mayor, by Holguín as the company's representative and by the municipality's director of Social Management. The municipality later told Primicias that the contract was never carried out, that it was dissolved when irregularities were detected, and that the partners who were officials were removed from their posts.

Boscán summed up the show's thesis in one sentence: drug trafficking does not come to Playas only for the municipality's money. It is after favors, such as a property registrar who does not report a suspicious sale to the UAFE (Ecuador's financial intelligence unit), land near the port of Posorja and, above all, money that enters the bank looking clean because it comes from the state.

Killings have dogged this administration from the start. On May 16, 2023, two days after the inauguration, Eduardo Omar Freire Vélez was killed as he left a meeting with the mayor; Balladares later said he had received death threats. According to Boscán, Freire Vélez, the father of Wendy Landa's boyfriend, was one of the three people closest to the mayor's campaign, and the other two, a brother of his and a man known as don Rolando, were also murdered.

According to Primicias, in June 2024 a former finance director from the previous administration was killed, and in December a 32-year-old municipal worker. That newspaper linked the pool hall massacre to reprisals against the network of Boris and his brother, alias 4K. Boscán said on air that the presence of the Sinaloa cartel in Playas is recorded in police reports submitted to the Interior Ministry.

The question Boscán closed the January show with was about the institutions. It had taken two journalists one weekend to cross-check ID numbers, companies and contracts. The UAFE, the Superintendency of Companies, the Attorney General's Office and the anti-narcotics units had that same information.

Nine months later, the Attorney General's Office arrived. Before dawn on Friday, October 30, 2026, agents from the Attorney General's Office and the National Police carried out six raids in Playas and Guayaquil in an operation they called Marea. One of them was at Mayor Balladares's home.

The raid came during a week in which the government had set its sights on mayors. Two days earlier, police had arrested the mayor of Vinces, Juan Alfonso Montalván, for alleged money laundering, and on October 29 Boscán & La Moni had published the recording of the mayor of Naranjal admitting that he is not the one in charge in his municipality.

What is known about the Marea case is alleged embezzlement in public works. What Boscán & La Moni showed in January is a web of contracts with the family of the mayor's partner and a business partnership with a drug trafficker. The Attorney General's Office has not yet said whether the two case files overlap.