Our Wednesday Sociedad Media Now newsletter on the latest development in regional security & organized crime.
Gang Leader Was Shot Dead at Guayaquil Airport. Noboa Responds by Granting Immunity to Foreign Troops
QUITO, ECUADOR — Two teenage gunmen concealed weapons inside a flower bouquet, walked into the arrivals hall of Guayaquil’s international airport on June 17, and shot dead the leader of the Los Águilas gang in broad daylight.
This occurred one day after President Noboa had declared a fresh 60-day state of emergency across 10 provinces — prompting a decree the next day granting full immunity to foreign security personnel participating in Ecuadorian operations, even as Manabí province records its most violent month for civilians since 2022.
Analysts documented that successive states of emergency have failed to reduce violence and may be driving it, and Ecuador’s own Constitutional Court ruled the situation does not meet the legal criteria for the internal armed conflict designation that underpins the immunity grant.
El Mayo Accepts Life Sentence In Brooklyn Courtroom As Sinaloa Cartel Tears Itself Apart
El Mayo Zambada — who founded the Sinaloa Cartel alongside El Chapo, moved at least 1.5 million kilograms of cocaine into the United States over 35 years, and was lured to a fake meeting by his own godson before waking up in U.S. custody in El Paso — accepted mandatory life imprisonment without parole in a Brooklyn sentencing memorandum on July 7.
The only condition he requested was that he not be placed in El Chapo’s supermax in Colorado.
The civil war his 2024 capture triggered has killed nearly 2,000 people in Sinaloa, cost the cartel control of 30 of its 42 trafficking routes, produced a more chaotic multi-front conflict as CJNG and other rivals fill the vacuum, and left the fentanyl and cocaine infrastructure he spent 55 years building being fought over by factions that were once his allies — with sentencing set for July 20 in Brooklyn and no end to the Sinaloa war in sight.
