The bomb and the narco's police officers

The source mentioned Connie Garcés days earlier. The source said she was the partner of Pedro Sánchez, alias Marino's number two, sent documents and told us to watch the news. The name had been in Mónica Velásquez's notebook since January 8, the day after Marino's death, jotted in the margin: Connie and Pedro, second. On March 3 someone shot at New Phone, a cellphone shop on Víctor Emilio Estrada avenue in Urdesa; the employees thought it was an extortion "vaccine." On March 4, 2026, at 02:10, two men on a motorcycle threw an explosive. The shutter was destroyed, the glass door shattered, part of the ceiling on the floor. A flyer with the names blacked out read: the mafia's doll, tell your husband this isn't extortion, pay up the money. The money: about ten million dollars that Los Lagartos claim from Sánchez.

No one was hurt. Minutes after the report appeared on social media, the source wrote: now you believe me.

We spent a whole day with Mónica Velásquez going over the life of someone whose name we always had and never examined. We spoke with members of Los Lagartos. Garcés, an Ecuavisa actress and presenter, model, 30, engineer, recently back from Argentina, was the partner of Ronald Sánchez León, Cojo Ronald, one of the leaders of Los Lagartos, who was murdered. Then of Samir Maestre, alias La S, the man who replaced Leandro Norero in the organization, murdered at his home in Samborondón by hired police officers, on Marino's orders according to sources. Briefly, of drug-trafficking police officer José Luis Cantuña, murdered a year ago. And then of Pedro Sánchez. According to those who handle Sánchez's money in the gang, he set her up with the shop after a fight. Nobody asks about the Mitsubishi Montero Sport and the previous-year BMW X5 in her name, worth more than 150,000 dollars, or the house in Villaclub in her mother's name, or the Rolex watches, on a television salary.

Pedro Sánchez is a former police officer, born in 1985, Marino's right-hand man and the number two of Los Lagartos. There are few photos of him: he moves with a guard of ten or twelve men in pickup trucks around his armored car. He was at the Mocolí soccer field, rented by Andrés Vélez Arcos, Micaela Morales's brother, on January 7, 2026, lying face down like everyone else, watching the hitmen's boots go by as they checked faces one by one, when the armed group killed Marino and two of his bodyguards. He survived. Today, according to our sources, he is out of the country: he tried to take control of the organization and ran into an internal rebellion. That same January 7, the organization's warehouses were robbed: tons of cocaine and cash stashed in trucks, about ten million dollars. Sánchez claimed the heist. That is the money in the flyer.

The police attributed the killing to Carlos Mantilla Ceballos, alias Choclo, the longtime leader of Los Lagartos, who is blamed for the murder of Efraín Ruales. As the days passed, that became hard to believe: Marino was loyal to him, and some facts raise suspicion. Nearly a dozen conversations with people in the organization point to Sánchez, for two reasons. The heart: Marino suspected that Sánchez, in love, was telling Garcés things and that was how shipments were being lost. The wallet: killing the leader makes you the next one. Los Lagartos were born in Guayaquil's prisons as an alliance of hitmen and gangs to stop Los Choneros; they are 25 to 40 men who decide who lives in the Provisional Detention Center, export cocaine to Rotterdam with Serbian and Moroccan partners, and patented a method: locate enemy groups' warehouses, steal the merchandise and ship it themselves.

Sánchez could not do it alone. Marino's security circle included Edwin Egas Alemán, alias Mono, in charge of bribing customs and port officials; Fernando García Álava, alias Conejo, in charge of bringing in the merchandise, meaning drugs stolen from enemy groups; and Carlos García Álava, alias Carlitos, who ran the team of hitmen that murdered Samir on Marino's orders and later finished off Marino himself. Sánchez and one of the Garcías are former police officers; the squad mixes hitmen with ex-officers. Almost all of them were at the field, walked away unharmed and then called to claim they were the new bosses. An Instagram story by Micaela Morales puts them all at one table: Garcés, Wendy Landa, Morales, her brother, Eduardo Freire and Sánchez, in one of his few photos. All of them had denied knowing one another.

That day, Micaela Morales, Marino's fiancée, had her phone flooded with messages bearing a lizard emoji, the claim of responsibility for the murder. She got a call that, she told her inner circle, came from Pedro Sánchez: she should find Marino's watches and hand them over. Before changing her number, she asked for a list of his assets around the world, not just those in Dubai: several tens of millions. She told her lawyers she thought she had fallen in love with a businessman. She is out of the country, avoiding the courts. The organization's money moved through companies in the names of Alexandra Burgos, Marino's ex-wife, and Adriana Fuentes Pacho, Sánchez's former live-in partner, at a multi-store where Sánchez received money from the Chinese mafia and where the January 7 robbery may have happened. After the January report they dissolved the company, and on February 2, 2026, they created another in the name of Burgos's brother.

Carlos Kada was a drug trafficker. On his phone there was a photo of a photo, taken from an app that blocks screenshots, showing his hand and his fingerprints: four active-duty National Police officers posing with a seizure and sending it, not to their superiors, but to him, to let him know his competitors' drugs were already in police hands. Seizing drugs not to fight trafficking but to help a trafficker do better business. The report also includes photos of the vehicles intelligence agents use to tail traffickers and the confidential police reports Kada had in his possession.

Through the Anti-Corruption Unit, known as ULCO, Kada gave the police the names of officers in that same unit who worked for the organization of alias Gato Farfán, a drug trafficker far bigger than Fito, captured in Colombia and jailed in the United States as a DEA target. The report was received by police commander Fausto Salinas, who delegated it to General Pablo Ramírez, later jailed in the Metástasis case. Within hours the hunt for Kada began. According to sources, Gato Farfán found out and ordered alias Blanco, someone close to Kada, to kill him as an informant; nearly all the Kadas fell. In the photo, according to sources, the man taking the selfie is Major Luis Naula, of the National Unit for the Investigation of Transnational Crimes, the unit that works most closely with the United States embassy; to his right is Lieutenant Paul Aguilar, of the same unit. The police were investigating the other two, hampered by the image's low resolution. The report with the names is with the National Police.

We published the photos on Tuesday, March 10. By 09:27 on Friday the 13th, nobody had requested the report: not Interior Minister John Reimberg, not the National Police commander.