Customs for sale

To understand why someone would pay three million for a public post, you have to understand what that post does. The deputy director general of operations of the National Customs Service, Senae, controls the yards, the physical inspections and the scanners at the ports: he decides which container is opened and which one goes through. For an importer evading taxes, that is worth a lot. For someone exporting cocaine hidden in bananas, it is worth more. Since 2021, Ecuador has been the main departure point for cocaine bound for Europe, almost all of it in shipping containers.

In September 2021, Juan José Aucancela, an Indigenous leader from Chimborazo and a CREO party activist who had organized support for Lasso's campaign, approached María Antonieta Reyes, the right-hand woman of Senae director Carola Ríos, at a Guayaquil shopping mall and offered her three million dollars to have Sergio Peña, a lawyer, appointed deputy director general of operations. According to Attorney General Diana Salazar, it was Ríos herself who called her to report it; the case file also records a call to the 1800-DELITO hotline and a report signed by Reyes, who was later fired. On October 14, 2021, Aucancela and Jhon Salas entered Carondelet, the presidential palace, through the main security checkpoint and spent an hour at the Secretariat of the Administration, headed by Iván Correa. The Attorney General's Office wiretapped the suspects' calls for months. On February 15, 2022, Pons tells Richard García that the day before he had been with the president and told him about the process, and that everything was being coordinated with Guido Chiriboga and Iván Correa. On the night of July 21, 2022, the Attorney General's Office carried out raids in four provinces, including Pons's home, and at six in the morning on the 22nd it brought charges of criminal association against eight detainees: Aucancela, Peña, the operator Marcos Leiva, Richard García, known as el Gordo García, Jhon Salas, Víctor Tonato, who collected the résumés, Marcos Reyes and Henry Cabrera. The judge ordered them to report periodically and barred them from leaving the country, rather than pretrial detention. Names of people who were not charged came up in the calls: Juan José Pons, Lasso's former honorary adviser, and his son; CREO's president, Guido Chiriboga; the secretary of the Administration, Iván Correa; the government minister, Francisco Jiménez; and Danilo Carrera, the president's brother-in-law, who according to the Attorney General's Office wrote that the customs director post was handled by number one. The case was named Danubio.

La Posta had been receiving reports for months that something was going on in customs; on July 25, 2022, with Pons's name already public, it devoted its first program to the case. On August 1 it launched a daily segment: the unpublished side of the Danubio case. That day it interviewed Ítalo Cedeño, general manager of Petroecuador, about corruption at the oil company; Boscán explained the four types of customs inspection and why the deputy manager of operations decides which container is opened, and Doménica Vivanco, who had copied by hand the case file of some 30 volumes, presented the unpublished material. That weekend, people linked to drug trafficking asked Boscán why they were asking questions about customs. The Attorney General's Office had not wiretapped Pons, Chiriboga or Correa; to listen in on Chiriboga, an assembly member, and Correa, who held ministerial rank, it would have needed authorization from the National Court of Justice because of their legal immunity.

On August 4, assembly members Luis Almeida and Geraldine Weber filed a complaint against Carola Ríos for illegally practicing a profession and usurping functions: the undergraduate degree under which she worked was, according to them, a technical certificate from a Chilean foundation dated 1994, registered with Senescyt four months after Lasso appointed her on May 24, 2021. The next day Almeida said on Café La Posta that the problem was not the degree but who controlled the scanners, this container gets inspected, this one doesn't, and that the customs police themselves estimated a billion dollars had been waived. On August 8, La Posta expanded on the case. On the 11th it published a seven-minute video, Pozo's hand in the customs network.

This was the thesis. Fabián Pozo, legal secretary to the presidency, had suggested Carola Ríos's name to run customs; Ríos had worked for the Eljuri group and had ties to Cuenca's big importers. Pozo was still a shareholder in a law firm devoted to customs matters, whose other partner, Francisco Gottifredi, filed customs briefs under his own name, acted as an outside adviser to the customs service and, according to La Posta's sources, went there two or three times a week to give instructions. Gottifredi, a private citizen, sat in on an official meeting between Senae and U.S. Embassy officials; it was the embassy that asked the government what a private individual was doing there, and the government replied that he was its outside adviser. The embassy, asked by La Posta, said it does not comment on the details of working meetings. Below Ríos was the post people were paying for: the deputy directorate of operations, which Ríos did not want to lose. It was her right-hand woman who reported it. And the vice president of the Oversight Committee who made the first request for information was Ana Belén Cordero, Pozo's wife. In the case file, three people said they had spoken with Guido Chiriboga about posts in customs.

On August 16, the full National Assembly voted, 92 in favor, to investigate Carola Ríos's appointment. On August 19, 2022, Andersson Boscán testified before the Oversight Committee, chaired by Fernando Villavicencio, alongside Attorney General Diana Salazar, to speak about the criminal association inside Senae. He laid out the structure of Danubio as La Posta had been revealing it every morning: the prices of the posts, Pozo's hand in Ríos's appointment, Gottifredi exercising unofficial influence. He said Ríos had kept the ports and airports without scanners for a year and a half, with the five or six scanners donated by a Chinese company left abandoned without maintenance, and that the two main importing groups always went through automatic clearance. He showed a chart of relationships in which Xavier Jordán and Leandro Norero appeared as heads of a corruption network in customs; Villavicencio said it came from customs intelligence and that he himself had given it to Ríos eight months earlier; the attorney general said she was not familiar with it. And he named Danilo Carrera, the president's brother-in-law, Rubén Cherres and Hernán Luque, five months before El Gran Padrino. Salazar replied that without evidence she could do nothing and that the rest was under seal; according to Boscán, the president got angry with the attorney general that day and their relationship remained tense.

What La Posta reported first was gradually confirmed. On August 17, Boscán revealed that in the technical wiretap room there were recordings whose volume was turned down so the system would not transcribe them, among them those of Chiriboga and the Pons, and that a raid was thwarted because minister Patricio Carrillo said the police officers were busy in Guayaquil. In October, the transcripts of the Pons calls appeared in the case file from page 63,000 onward: the case grew from 10,000 pages in July to almost 80,000, 69 volumes, in October. In August Pons gave a half-page statement in which he denied everything; the prosecutor did not ask him a single question. The Committee summoned him three times and he never showed up; neither did Fabián Pozo, Aparicio Caicedo, Pons Junior, Gottifredi, nor Carola Ríos the first time. Ana Belén Cordero recused herself from everything related to Danubio. Danilo Carrera, summoned by the Attorney General's Office, also failed to appear at the first appointments.

Plan V criticized the testimony: unsourced conjecture, information overheard in hallways, a chart of unknown origin. Boscán replied that those were the things he went to the Assembly to say and that some had the indecency to call exaggeration. On August 22, Villavicencio came on Café La Posta to follow up on the case. On October 18 and 19, La Posta published the transcripts of the wiretapped calls of the Pons and the network's operators. On October 20, 2022, the pretrial investigation was closed, with 428 investigative steps and 114 prosecutorial motions.

Danubio produced only one conviction. Víctor Limones, a business engineer, accepted a plea agreement, and on January 24, 2023, Judge Nelly Parrales sentenced him to one year in prison for criminal association: the calls mentioned contributions of 300 dollars for posts with salaries of 2,500 to 3,000. The other eight were sent to trial. The hearing was first set for November 9, 2023, and has been suspended eight times: November 2023, May and September 2024, and the ones after that. In February 2026, Judge Keltthya López set the ninth attempt for March 18 and 25, 2026, and warned that she would not allow any more suspensions. The possible sentence is up to five years. Primicias revealed that Peña's network had allegedly fabricated fake proof of funds to offer the bribes.

On October 18, 2022, La Posta read out the transcripts the technical wiretap room had made of the calls between Juan José Pons and his son, Juan José Pons Junior: contracts and payments, fifteen sticks, fifteen million; Pons Junior arranged meetings with Energy Minister Xavier Vera and with Hernán Luque, manager of the state-owned companies, in the Ministry of the Coast building, and asked that they be seen moving so that the others would pay the other fifteen; investigators believed it was the commission on a payment to a supplier. Vera and Luque did not respond. There were also the conversations in which Pons told Richard García, el Gordo García, his operator, whom to invite to a meeting to discuss the matter of the posts, which according to Pons was not moving. A community leader from Santa Elena said that after Lasso took office, Pons asked them for résumés for public posts in the province. On October 19, the chats of Aucancela, Tonato, Salas and Luna: on April 29, 2022, they were talking about a candidate for the Agriculture Ministry, twelve goes inside, you have to ask for fifteen or twenty; five days later Bernardo Manzano was appointed minister. Pons denied any involvement: he said he only knew García, a community leader who organized grassroots groups in various provinces, and had for more than fifteen years. Pons Junior said he had only known García since 2013 and that he talked politics with Peña.

Sergio Peña, the key figure, was elected assembly member for the Citizen Revolution in 2023 and was later expelled from the Correísta movement. Carola Ríos remained at the head of Senae; she was still there in April 2023; she was never charged. Neither was Fabián Pozo. Juan José Pons gave a half-page statement and never appeared before the Committee. Iván Correa left Carondelet on February 9, 2023, the day after La Posta published the organizational chart of the structure. Boscán returned to the Oversight Committee in February 2023 to present El Gran Padrino, with 35,000 documents, and in April 2023 announced he would not go a fourth time: the Attorney General's Office had eight investigations open based on his contributions, for criminal association, organized crime, bribery, extortion by public officials, embezzlement and influence peddling, and the Committee, with Ana Belén Cordero implicated, had not looked into anything he brought them about customs. Villavicencio, he said, admitted to having shelved the report on the Albanian mafia.

Customs remained at the center. In 2023 Danubio intersected with El Gran Padrino and the Albanian mafia: the structure that was asking fifteen million for the airport cargo zone, according to Boscán, was the same one the police had mapped in the León de Troya report. Villavicencio was assassinated on August 9, 2023. Norero was murdered in Latacunga prison on October 3, 2022, two weeks before the Danubio pretrial investigation closed.