Peace or lead

Until September 2021, the only account of what went on inside Ecuador's prisons was the official one. No team of journalists had entered the cellblocks without state escort to ask the inmates who was in charge. La Posta went in with the two permissions you need, the state's, which lets you in, and the inmates', which lets you out alive, and came out with a map of who controls each block.

For the first time, the country learned the full names of the gang leaders, how they divided up the prisons and how they divided up territory, based on a police chart of organized crime that the team adapted to protect its sources. The series showed the tentacles of organized crime controlling institutions before the state admitted it.

To understand the massacres you have to understand one man. Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias JL or Rasquiña, started out as a cellphone thief, went on to become a hitman and, from prison, built Los Choneros, the gang born in Manabí in the late 1990s. Around 2007 it moved into logistics for the cartels, in 2017 it absorbed the former Ñetas, and for a decade it controlled the country's prisons, street-level drug dealing, cooperation with drug trafficking and contract killing. He earned a law degree while in prison. He turned the gang into a corporation: he let his trusted men run their own subdivisions, all under his command. Fito and Javi, now free, founded Las Águilas, based in Manabí. Junior, a hitman from La Troncal who was not a Chonero and met JL in prison, was the armed wing with Los Fatales. Ben 10 and El Hebreo, brothers, took over the Chonekillers in Durán. Willy, a former prison guard, took the Tiguerones. Pipo, Los Lobos in Latacunga. While JL was alive, they coexisted.

He was killed on December 28, 2020, at a shopping mall in Manta, outside prison, where he had been untouchable; he had been released on early parole months earlier. Police intelligence at the time attributed the killing to Los Lagartos with support from Mexican cartels. Fito was supposed to inherit. It was not that simple: each leader had his own way of ruling and none was willing to submit to another. Fito and Junior allied in La Regional prison; Ben 10, El Hebreo, Willy and Los Lobos formed the other side. On February 21, 2021, inmates took guards hostage in La Regional to stop two weapons meant to kill Fito and Junior from getting in; pamphlets announced their deaths with nods to a Mexican cartel. Two days later, on February 23, 79 dead in simultaneous riots. On September 28, 119 dead in the Litoral Penitentiary, the worst prison massacre in the country's history: Junior's Block 3 against El Hebreo's Block 2, separated by a two-and-a-half-meter wall and a fence that can be cut. The official version spoke of a war between the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel. La Posta decided to ask them.

On September 30, 2021, two days after the massacre, Boscán published the prologue with a map in hand: the Penitentiary has twelve cellblocks and each is controlled by a gang; La Roca, the maximum-security prison, is empty; in La Regional, Fito and Junior are in charge. Fifteen days earlier, three drones had flown over La Regional without any jammer stopping them; one exploded with C4 over the maximum-security block where Fito and Junior are held and bent the beams above Junior's cell; the other two went down when the inmates pulled out two rifles. It was not a message. It was an assassination attempt, and it set off the slaughter. A 911 call during the riot, which La Posta obtained, shows an inmate begging them to send the law as gunshots ring out. The first day left 19 dead in Block 5. The government said everything was under control. Then 70 more were killed. The war of the previous year and a half had left more than 200 dead in the prisons and at least 1,200 in the streets.

To get into an Ecuadorian prison you need two permissions: the state's, which lets you in, and the inmates', which lets you out alive. The first was granted in writing by Fausto Cobo's SNAI in June 2021; permission from the four rival gangs came through an operator for Leandro Norero, and Fito and Junior's through a phone call a businessman from the coast made from Boscán's office. On the morning of the visit, about a hundred police officers were carrying out a search, armed and carrying cellphones, with no one keeping track of how many weapons came in and went out. The entry inspection lasted an hour, but the scanner screens were off, the conveyor belts were not running and the detectors failed to find the objects the team deliberately left in their pockets. The guards who escorted them had no lethal weapons, and the ones they did carry had no ammunition; the country had about 1,300 guards when it needed 4,500. At the door of Block 2 they waited twenty minutes for the key keeper, an inmate, to open the peephole. Only the inmates have the keys. Each cellblock is a walled compound five meters high with an armed lookout at the top; when you arrive they ask which block you want to go to, and that is how the prison ended up carved up like a cake.

The second installment is about the economy. Each cellblock has a commander who sets the rules; each wing, a caporal who controls about 250 inmates and three businesses. The pushers are authorized to sell drugs, cheaper than on the street, at one dollar a dose of H or cripy, which serves as currency. The bank is an inmate who receives between 5,000 and 50,000 dollars a week to lend out at 30 or 100 percent interest. And then there is the store. Cigarettes are banned and bought anyway: 20 dollars a pack. Smuggling in a cellphone costs 300 and using it, 20 a week. The state invested hundreds of thousands in signal jammers, and inside, the right to use a router costs 30 dollars a week; Boscán tested it by tuning in to La Posta from Block 2, the Chonekillers' block. And you pay for what you don't want: the cell, the mattress, razors every week; whoever doesn't pay goes to quarantine, a few square meters for forty inmates who sleep in shifts on the floor. A cellblock brings in between 50,000 and 70,000 dollars a week, about 200,000 a month. There are twelve. In 2024 Boscán calculated the whole system: 20 dollars a week from each of 40,000 inmates, 800,000 a week in internal fees alone.

Fito received the team in his cellblock: the first time a news outlet spoke with the leader of Las Águilas, who ran La Regional and two blocks of the Penitentiary. Junior, whom the police fear, offered them a Red Bull and cigarettes and talked on the rooftop, under the hole the drone left. When an inmate escaped from La Regional, the state had to ask Fito and Junior to recapture him. The searches, which inmates call raquetas, turn up decoy weapons so the police can say they are doing something; on October 4, La Posta released audio of a police officer tipping off Fito's and Junior's cellblocks about the operation being prepared by commander Tannya Varela. And La Roca is still empty; when the team asked why the ringleaders aren't taken there, the answer was: that would be to the death. Hours after the visit there was a shootout in the Penitentiary that no media outlet reported. Days later came the September 28 massacre.

The third installment heads out to the street. A Friday in a working-class area of Guayaquil: a pedestrian alley with gates whose keys are held by the drug dealers; outside, children play with toy guns, and inside, in a three-by-six-meter room, five young men between 17 and 32 package cripy and H while a newborn sleeps in the only bedroom. In that neighborhood there are at least forty sales points, and each brings in between 100 and 150 dollars a day. The drugs come from San Lorenzo, in Esmeraldas, where guerrillas dominate drug trafficking; a few blocks away a military checkpoint searches everything and finds nothing. There's no age limit for using, they say. At night, in Durán, the Chonekillers show off their armed elite squad, pray in the middle of the street in a ritual inherited from the Ñetas and put a twenty-year-old hitman in front of the camera: he killed for the first time at 18; a killing costs 150 dollars if the target is nobody and more than a thousand if it's somebody.

The fourth installment returns to the prisons with the underlying question. Fito denies ordering JL's death. They all deny working for Mexican cartels: I live in Ecuador, I'm not going to let a foreigner impose a regime. In 2008 the Correa government listened to the Ñetas and the Latin Kings, treated them at health centers, enrolled them in university, organized them into work crews and got them to lay down their weapons and leave the streets. Fito and Junior signed a peace agreement, but alone, without their rivals. The leaders offered to hand over the weapons in the prisons if they were separated. The problem is plain to see on the Penitentiary's floor plan: the cellblocks of one side and the other are intermingled, one wall apart. The series' proposal is elementary: separate them with walls or with uniformed officers and open a peace process. Peace processes are never the most popular option.

No one was separated. Three weeks after the fourth installment, Lasso offered mediation by the Episcopal Conference, which called it a good wish. On the night of November 12, 2021, seventeen days after the fourth installment, there was a new massacre in the Litoral Penitentiary: 68 dead according to the Attorney General's Office's first count, a figure the government lowered to 62, and 44 wounded. Boscán reconstructed it on Monday the 15th, with sources inside: days earlier the police had disarmed Block 2, run by Ben 10 and El Hebreo, which had recently been moved; Junior's Block 3 attacked it; 950 inmates took refuge in one wing while most of the dead, more than 40, were burned in Block F, a transitional block where inmates paid to avoid living with the dangerous ones. It was 350 police officers against 2,000 armed men, more than five thousand rounds of ammunition, and the police went in at 2:30 a.m., with the soldiers outside because the previous head of the Joint Command had lobbied the Constitutional Court to keep them from going in. The Lasso government convened all branches of the state and announced a new state of emergency, advice from Colombia, the entry of soldiers into the prisons as special zones and a pacification process led by Nelsa Curbelo with the Episcopal Conference. It never happened. September 2021 had been the most violent month in ten years, 320 deaths compared with 105 a year earlier; Guayas surpassed Sinaloa in its murder rate. The massacres continued in 2022 and 2023. The country ended 2021 with 17.1 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, and in 2023 it reached 47, the highest rate in Latin America.

The main players went their own ways. Fito escaped from La Regional in January 2024; his escape set off simultaneous riots, bomb attacks and kidnappings of police officers, and Daniel Noboa's government declared an internal armed conflict. He was recaptured on June 25, 2025, in a luxury bunker in Montecristi, and on July 20, 2025, he was extradited to the United States, the first Ecuadorian handed over for organized crime after the 2023 constitutional reform. In February 2026 his hearing in New York was postponed amid reports of negotiations with prosecutors. Junior Roldán was murdered in Colombia in May 2023. Pipo, whom the police had considered dead, was captured in November 2025 as head of Los Lobos, by then the most powerful organization in the country. Four of Fito's bodyguards were convicted in November 2025.

So did the journalists. Starting in October 2021, Boscán received direct threats: a group calling itself Los Fantasmas released a video, armed, against La Posta; he was sent photos of his daughters getting on the school bus; and prosecutor Salazar had him enrolled in the Victim and Witness Protection System. Fundamedios called for immediate action. Boscán said in 2024 that he had received 27 threats of considerable risk. He went into exile in 2023, and in September 2024 he and Mónica Velásquez left the country again. In 2024 the La Posta team went back into the prisons: Turi in February, the operations center of Los Lobos with 971 inmates, and Esmeraldas in June, with 1,518 inmates and more than 150 weapons and 88,000 rounds of ammunition seized, where alias Santos, the caporal, charged each inmate 10 dollars a week and punished them with a whip. That June, Boscán revealed for the first time how he had reached Norero, Fito and Junior. The 2021 thesis has still not been put into practice.