The fall of Fito

José Adolfo Macías Villamar, Fito, walked out of La Regional prison in Guayaquil in January 2024. The official version puts the escape on January 7; Boscán maintains that the state noticed almost fifteen days late and that, according to police sources, he left at Christmas. From then on, Daniel Noboa's government searched for him without success: Interpol alerts, confidential tip lines and, in March 2025, a one-million-dollar reward and a criminal investigation for escape. Many assumed he was out of the country. Boscán suspected the opposite: Fito stayed in Manabí, the area he controlled like no one else, and from there, on at least three occasions, he offered the government a deal.

The first lead was the family. In January 2024 his wife, Inda Peñarrieta, and his children moved into a 300,000-dollar house on Lake San Roque in Córdoba, Argentina; she posted geotagged photos on Facebook, and Argentina's anti-narcotics force detained and expelled them. Once they were handed over to Ecuador, Diana Salazar's Attorney General's Office released them, Velásquez recalled. In late 2024, police arrested Verónica Briones, Fito's romantic partner and the mother of his youngest daughter, for money laundering while she was visiting a house under construction in the Monterrey area, between Manta and Montecristi, registered to Cristian Mendoza. No one knew at the time that there was a bunker underneath.

On June 2, 2025, police hit the first ring. In Manabí, Guayas and Pichincha they arrested Yandry Nicomedes Macías Villamar, Fito's brother; a brother-in-law; Briones's parents and a brother of hers, and seized 26 vehicles and 47 properties valued at 12 million dollars. Boscán reported that the investigation had sat frozen for more than a year in the financial crimes unit and that acting Attorney General Wilson Toainga dusted it off; a report by the UAFE, Ecuador's financial intelligence unit, from at least three years earlier already showed where the money moved: not through the wife, but through the romantic partner and the brother's circle. The next day he added what had appeared in intelligence reports since 2021: the family circle's companies, Iris, in cleaning and catering; Homabi, in heavy freight; and Queen Water, in ice and water, were state suppliers between 2021 and 2023. The Blanqueo Fito case describes 37 million dollars laundered, mostly over the past five years, houses and vehicles worth 13 million and accounts that moved 24 million.

With his family in custody, Fito reached out to the government. According to Boscán's intelligence sources, three times: first through Claudia Garzón, a former member of the peace commission created by Guillermo Lasso who was later implicated in the Metástasis case; then through a police major who had taken part in rescuing his daughter, kidnapped two years earlier; and finally through police officers in Manta, about two months before the capture. His demands shrank with each attempt: not to be extradited, to recover his assets, to keep his family out of it and to face no consequences; in the end, only that they respect his life. The government said no all three times. And there was a video call: in early May 2025, about twenty minutes long, between Fito and Interior Minister John Reimberg. The minister first denied it and admitted it on July 1.

The fourth channel was Colombia. On June 9, 2025, the Colombian Foreign Ministry received, through its ambassador in Quito, María Antonia Velasco, and Deputy Minister Rosa Yolanda Villavicencio, a handwritten letter attributed to Fito asking Colombia to act as guarantor of his surrender to avoid extradition to the United States. According to Noticias Uno's report, the negotiation began in early June, after his relatives were captured: Fito feared they would be sent to La Roca, controlled by Los Lobos, and offered to turn himself in in exchange for the return of some assets and the transfer of his family to La Regional, which Los Choneros control. On June 4 his lawyers met with an adviser appointed by Reimberg; they said they had information that the government's plan was to send him to El Salvador's mega-prison or to kill him, and that was why they wanted a guarantor. The published chats show the intermediary writing to the ambassador, 'Doctor, it's urgent. Letter from alias Fito asking for Colombia as guarantor of his surrender,' and her passing along the deputy foreign minister's number. The newspaper La Hora added that Fito didn't trust Reimberg and believed the best route was Toainga's Attorney General's Office, quickly, before the CPCCS appointed a new attorney general.

Police reached the house through an official who was paid without working. An intelligence report from late 2024 identified a network of ghost employees in the Manta municipal government: at the Transit Agency, Cristian Germán Mendoza Vélez and at least seven others drew salaries and didn't show up to work, all linked to Los Choneros. Transit is a key post for drug trafficking: it sees when police enter on the highways and coordinates the pickups of drugs and weapons. Mendoza had no criminal record or gang markings, and he was the owner of the Monterrey house. While tailing him, agents saw that he lived with three other men and that one of them, in the middle of a court case and required to check in every fifteen days outside Manabí, stopped on the way back at a pharmacy to buy baby formula and medicines. There were no children in the house. The medicines were for diabetes, glaucoma and hypertension: Fito's illnesses.

The house was on the list, along with 27 other properties in the area. Police had raided it when they arrested Briones, came back in February 2025 and again in March, and didn't find the hiding place: not even the densitometer that measures wall thickness revealed it. But they kept coming back because of what they saw: medicines at the back of a cupboard, a girl's toys, a plastic dinosaur identical to the one in photos of Fito's daughter with Briones, a red stroller on the balcony, armored doors on the bedrooms and a pool with a slide whose sliding roof made it vanish from drone footage, a strategy Vivanco recalled from one of El Chapo Guzmán's houses. Velásquez summed it up in 2026: the property was raided six times without results, because each time Fito went down into the bunker and waited, until the toys by the pool signaled that the daughter was there and, probably, the father.

On June 25, 2025, at five in the morning, the Armed Forces entered the house and sealed off fifteen blocks in every direction; about 200 soldiers, in the operation dubbed Gran Fénix 23. Military sources cited on the show said an intercepted call to his family was the starting point, the same crack that brought down Pablo Escobar in 1993. Ministers John Reimberg and Gian Carlo Loffredo flew to Manta; on a flyover, they noticed an irregular planting behind the house and called for heavy machinery. Velásquez said the operation lasted about twelve hours and that Fito only came out when they cut the electricity, he lost ventilation and he heard the excavators above his head: the police didn't find him, he panicked. He opened the hatch, and soldiers and police were waiting for him above. 'I'm not the way they make me out to be,' he told Loffredo. That same day Noboa, from his overseas tour, credited the capture to the Solidarity and Intelligence laws passed two weeks earlier. Fito arrived at the Simón Bolívar air base in Guayaquil at 21:15, paraded by the ministers before the cameras, and entered La Roca, the prison he had refused to go to in January 2024 because he believed he would be killed there.

Four guards fell with him: Carlos Cedeño, Cristian Mendoza, Freddy Zambrano and Eduardo Hurtado. Only one was listed as a known member of Los Choneros; Boscán read it as a minimal bubble to avoid leaks, with a one-million-dollar reward at stake. Intelligence sources who did not take part in the operation wondered, however, why the most wanted man in the country had a single gun with a single bullet and why his bodyguards, jiu-jitsu black belts, carried no weapons; they did not rule out that Fito had been lured with the promise of a meeting. Boscán also tempered the official heroics: the capture was the work of the ULCO, the police unit that had spent months tracking Fito and that traveled to the United States with the DEA and Homeland Security to prepare three cases, and it was credited to the Armed Forces because they needed a lifeline after letting alias Fede walk out of the Penitenciaría prison.

The house, which the show displayed in exclusive photos on June 30, was still under construction, with luxury finishes: a grill area, a kitchen, a wine decanter, a billiards room, a gym, the pool with a slide. The bunker, beneath a floor tile that slid aside, had air conditioning, a fan, a refrigerator and a bed; the soldiers compared it to those in Israel, Syria or Palestine. Six phones were collected. On July 2 the security team returned with backhoes to the yard, six or seven times larger than the house, and dug up a stash: firearms, ammunition, cash, jewelry and four Rolex watches worth between 20,000 and 35,000 dollars each. A collector once explained to Boscán what they're for: with three watches on your wrists, you can get through an airport carrying a million and a half dollars. Before the capture, police had entered Briones's cell and found documents and an electronic device detailing how drug money was mixed with money from legitimate businesses through a network of shell companies.

The recapture was the government's biggest security win and, according to Boscán, saved the jobs of Reimberg and Loffredo, who had been on thin ice weeks earlier. It didn't stay intact for long. The following weekend, Colombia's Noticias Uno reported that Fito himself had given the minister the address for a meeting on June 25 and that, instead of the minister, the counterterrorism police showed up. Reimberg replied on X: 'Colombia's Canal 1 is lying,' Fito did not surrender, there was no deal and Colombia was not involved, the operation was one hundred percent Ecuadorian. Boscán asked for precision: is it lying about the letter? No, the letter exists. About the ambassador receiving it? No. About there being a delegate and a video call? The minister hadn't addressed that. On July 1, on Jimmy Jairala's show, Reimberg admitted the twenty-minute video call in early May: Fito asked for things, everything was refused, and after that call he himself led the operations to strip him of his assets and companies and arrest his family. In one week the official versions changed five times: the laws, a call to the 131 tip line, the little girl who said where her dad was, the transit agent, the medicines. Police sources, Velásquez said, were annoyed because the minister talked about the girl when it had been agreed not to.

Evidence

The Colombian Foreign Ministry acknowledged receiving the communication on June 9, said its authenticity had not been verified and that it does not act as guarantor for drug traffickers; the ambassador denied receiving any letter. Gustavo Petro wrote that he doesn't know Fito. The Colombian president had been in Manta after Noboa's inauguration on May 24, and a column in El Tiempo placed him at a mansion belonging to a relative of Fito. Velásquez and the team debunked it with facts: Petro stayed in Santa Marianita, in a rented beach house owned by a Quito businessman with no ties to politics, surrounded by Ecuadorian police and soldiers who were actually running surveillance on him for fear of contact with Fito's people. There were, according to Velásquez's reporting, delegates and lawyers for Fito who requested a meeting with Petro, including a trip to Colombia; the meeting never took place. Boscán noted that Fito approached the Colombian embassy and not the U.S. one for a reason: he knew who might open the door to him. And the Noticias Uno journalist told them, in two calls, that the physical letter, the recordings and the chats came to him from a senior official in the Ecuadorian government.

The case file had another consequence. On June 30, Manta's mayor, Marciana Valdivieso, asked the government to take over the Public Mobility Company: one of its employees, on the payroll for more than thirteen years, was part of Fito's ring, and the institution had accumulated assaults, threats, bombs, deaths and systematic absences. Boscán recounted what the late Mayor Intriago had told him: one of the first calls a mayor of Manta gets, on election day itself, is from Fito, to let him know who's in charge. And he asked what the state would do with the other transit employees fully identified by the police command, the Interior Ministry and intelligence. In Esmeraldas the Tiguerones do it, and in El Oro other gangs: transit agencies are the front line that warns when the police are coming, and that's why so many agents are murdered.

Fito had a lawyer in New York as of June 26, the day after the capture: a criminal defense attorney known for representing Colombian kingpins, among them alias Chupeta, of the Norte del Valle cartel. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York had charged him since April 2024 with seven counts: conspiracy to distribute cocaine internationally, distribution of cocaine in two shipments of about 1,100 and 800 kilos, use of firearms in drug trafficking, smuggling weapons from the United States and conspiracy to purchase weapons fraudulently. Boscán had said on June 26 that the only way to know whether there had been a deal was called extradition. Reimberg promised it would happen before December. It took 25 days: Fito accepted extradition before the president of the National Court of Justice, José Suing, in a matter of seconds, according to international affairs analyst Esteban Santos, and the United States committed in writing not to impose life imprisonment or the death penalty. On Sunday, July 20, 2025, a Justice Department plane left Guayaquil at two in the afternoon and landed in New York around eight at night, with no official announcement until Noboa's tweet: 'Goodbye forever, Fito.' On July 21, before a federal court in Brooklyn and through an interpreter, he pleaded not guilty; the prosecutor asked that he be denied bail because of how dangerous he was, his two escapes and his ties to the Sinaloa cartel.

What follows is what Boscán listed on the day of the recapture: what he will reveal and whom he will expose. Who helped him reach the highest office of the Attorney General's Office and offered protection to a family that was never prosecuted; the active and retired police generals who paid him homage for a monthly payment, some of it delivered by small plane in Samborondón, and who ran operations against Los Lobos to leave the ports open for him; the ministers with whom he did make deals for privileges in the prisons in exchange for cooling things down on the streets; the officials who asked him for help recapturing escapees; the campaigns for mayor, provincial prefect and national office that he financed; who, in Lasso's government, opened up public money so his companies could become state suppliers; who helped him escape in 2024, in an escape that former Attorney General Salazar refused to investigate; the soldiers who guard the drugs coming in across the northern border; the facilities the main banks provided to move 30 million dollars through his accounts and his family's. And, above all, that he is not Ecuador's top kingpin: there are bigger, more violent and quieter ones. In the United States, Santos explained, cooperation is negotiated openly and in exchange for evidence: routes, operators, banks, officials. Velásquez maintained that there had been some kind of conversation or agreement, with several embassies aware of it, and that for now the extradition was a reward: in a federal prison, Fito is far less likely to die than in La Roca.

In October 2025, from Canada, Boscán published five installments on El Prólogo about alias La Muerte, Fito's main triggerman, who called him on WhatsApp from a prison in Mexico while Boscán was cooking pasta on a Sunday. He killed for the first time at age nine, two boys who stole his bread at school, at 17th Street and Gómez Rendón in southwest Guayaquil, for twenty dollars he never collected; he stopped tattooing his victims on his body after cross number 72. He was recruited by alias Fede's brother-in-law in Bastión Popular, introduced himself to Fito, then Rasquiña's number two, by video call, and was sent to a hitman school in Sucumbíos run by alias Lalo, where active and retired soldiers spent a month and a half training young men convinced they were guerrillas; graduation required biting into a corpse's heart. He described the trade: 17 or 18 days of surveillance, the address pulled from the electricity or water bill, which is why the narcos place people at CNEL, the water companies and the transit agencies; the videos of the children getting on the school bus; the advance call Fito required so the victim would know who and why. He walked into a health center in Santo Domingo dressed as a police officer with six men to finish off a wounded man under guard, and into La Regional prison dressed as a guard to protect Fito. He charged up to 50,000 dollars for a job, for someone famous. He left Manta with what he thought was a two-ton shipment, and the Mexican Navy boarded him before Chiapas: it was 100 kilos, a false flag to get rid of him. He called, he said, so people would be told that none of it is worth it.

The structure kept falling. In May 2026, Velásquez placed Fito in the series of kingpins who fell for love: Escobar because of the birthday call to his son, El Chapo because of an actress, Fito because of the toys by the pool. On June 16, 2026, Ronald Javier Macías Villamar, alias Javi, Fito's younger brother, was arrested in Colombia with a false Colombian identity and documents and an Interpol red notice; he had been sentenced to twelve years for homicide and released in 2018 when the highest court voided his appeals, and to the anti-narcotics police he was the last major active Chonero. Ecuador's search team located him and Colombian authorities arrested him; Reimberg accused the Colombian government on Caracol of refusing to hand him over until the red notice arrived. Boscán reconstructed the list: Celso and Fede in custody awaiting extradition, Topo with extradition ordered, Yandry detained, a brother sentenced in 2026 to ten years for money laundering; of the generation that inherited Rasquiña's gang, only a son of Fito remained free. Less than a month later, in the early hours of July 12, 2026, David Macías Villamar, a brother whom the gang never let into the leadership and who was arming people in Puerto López, was gunned down in the Altos de Olón housing development in Manglaralto: 40 spent casings, 30 of them 9 millimeter and 10 of them 5.56, according to the police report. In 2021 the Attorney General's Office had shelved a preliminary investigation into him. Los Choneros, 30,000 or 40,000 people, kept operating with their leadership in pieces, seven or eight losses in ten months, while Los Lobos, by then the country's top criminal structure, and a kingpin the police call Loco Ovidio fought over the areas that had been theirs.