Ecuador closed out 2025 with 411 recorded femicides — a woman killed roughly every 22 hours, and the deadliest year since the country began classifying the crime in 2014, according to Fundación Aldea’s Femicide Map, a civil-society registry that has become the country’s most cited independent count.
The toll caps a broader, cumulative total of 2,391 femicides recorded since 2014.
A Crisis Reshaped by the Drug War
What distinguishes 2025’s numbers isn’t just their scale — it’s their character. At least 256 of the 411 cases, or 62%, occurred within criminal systems and gang-related contexts, according to Fundación Aldea, a dramatic reversal from 2019, when organized-crime-linked killings accounted for just 9% of femicides.
Firearms were used in 78% of 2025’s cases, up from 9% in 2019.
The shift tracks Ecuador’s broader collapse into cartel-driven violence since 2024 as President Daniel Noboa declared war on organized crime; the country recorded 9,283 total murders in 2025, among the highest homicide rates in Latin America.
Guayas province — anchored by Guayaquil, the epicenter of Ecuador’s gang conflict — recorded by far the most femicides, with 140 cases, more than triple the next-highest province, Manabí, at 70. Los Ríos (44), El Oro (37), and Pichincha (23), home to Quito, rounded out the worst-hit regions.
The victims skew far younger and more varied than femicide statistics have historically captured: 50 were children or adolescents, 18 were trans-women, 126 were mothers, and 16 were pregnant when they were killed.
The scale of the crisis is complicated by how Ecuador’s state counts it. The Public Prosecutor’s Office officially recognized only 55 femicides in 2025, despite 775 documented female homicides overall — a gap civil-society groups attribute to the state’s narrow classification standard, which does not count organized-crime-related killings of women as femicides even when gender is plainly a factor in how or why the killing occurred.
The Feminist Alliance, another group mapping the crisis independently, has described its own registry as “a political tool to name new realities of femicides that official figures conceal,” framing the act of counting itself as “an act of justice and resistance against institutional silencing.”
The Government’s Response
Noboa’s government has answered Ecuador’s violence primarily with security measures aimed at organized crime broadly.
Curfews have been imposed repeatedly in coastal provinces — most recently a 15-day overnight curfew announced on September 17 across four provinces — alongside sustained police and military deployments conducting patrols and raids in “critical zones.”
Those measures have coincided with the deadliest year on record for women, and rights groups note the femicide toll rose even as military operations expanded.
