Who is Fito, the escaped prisoner from Ecuador who has generated the state of emergency in the country?
José Adolfo Macías Villamar has 14 judicial proceedings for different crimes, including robberies, organized crime, possession of weapons and murders. It is not the first time he has escaped.
The president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, has declared - after a group of hooded men broke into a television station in the city of Guayaquil - the existence of an “internal conflict” in the country and has ordered the Armed Forces to carry out military actions to fight against organized crime.
In the middle of a prison crisis after the escape of one of the inmates considered the most dangerous in the country, José Adolfo Macías Villamar, alias ‘Fito’, Ecuador has entered a state of exception which will be in force for 60 days.
State of emergency declared in Ecuador
This Ecuadorian-American politician hopes that the state of emergency, which covers “the entire national territory” – including the ‘centros de privación de la libertad’ (deprivation of liberty centers) that make up the National System of Social Rehabilitation – , will allow the use of the Armed Forces, in support of the Police, to bring the prisons under control.
According to the executive decree, the traffic limitation extends from 11:00 p.m. at night to 5:00 a.m. and people traveling during said hours “will be placed under the orders of the competent judicial authority.”
It’s not the first time Fito has escaped
Now, why is everyone talking about ‘Fito’? At 44 years old, he has 14 judicial proceedings for different crimes (organized crime, drug trafficking and murder), which together amounted to the maximum sentence of 34 years in prison. Of these, 12 have been spent in the Guayaquil Regional Prison.
And it is not the first time he has escaped. In fact, in 2013 ‘Fito’ and 15 other prisoners from the ‘Los Choneros’ gang, including the leader of the collective, Jorge Luis Zambrano, escaped from the maximum security prison called ‘La Roca’, located within the same penitentiary complex. For 10 months, they were the most wanted criminals in the country, until they were tracked down by the police.
Succession of events
The rise of ‘Fito’ to the leadership of ‘Los Choneros’ was not a coincidence. It occurred as a result of the murder of Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias ‘Rasquiña’. He had maintained leadership of the organization, which has its origins in the decade of the 80s in Manabí, a province on the Ecuadorian coast, after the founder Jorge Véliz alias ‘Teniente España’ was killed by a rival gang ‘Los Queseros’.
‘Los Choneros’, although they gained fame as hitmen, over time they expanded their crimes to drug trafficking, micro-trafficking, extortion and robberies. What’s more, they were the first to create relations with foreign cartels, according to police reports.
No news of his whereabouts
On August 12, ‘Fito’ had been transferred to ‘La Roca’, in an operation that required almost 4,000 police and military personnel, and which later caused disorders in that prison which demanded that he be returned to the regional penitentiary center where he had his center of power. This ended up happening at any ratre, as was foresseable, thanks to the sentence of a judge who ordered his transfer back to prison from where he commanded all operations.
Currently, the big unknown is how 'Fito' could have escaped from prison, his private bunker and from where he continued to control his criminal gang. The most likely scenario is that there were “infiltrations” and it was a “matter of hours.”
Or at least that is what the Secretary of Communication of the government of Ecuador, Roberto Izurieta, has pointed out. In photographs distributed by the police he can be seen with an obese appearance, long hair and a prominent beard.