Noboa challenges López Obrador by including the drug trafficker El Mayo Zambada on a list of military objectives

The Government of Ecuador has published a list of military objectives of terrorist groups that is made up of eleven people considered ringleaders and has divided them into three levels of danger. At the head are the boss of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, Ismael Mario Zambada García, alias

, and Geovany Andrés Rojas, alias

of the dissident group of the Border Commandos, from Colombia. President Daniel Noboa had anticipated that the security bloc had new military objectives. “No one has had the courage to say their names or their location, but they have focused on minor bosses and blamed everything on minor bosses,” said the president at an event in Quito, in a clear reference to the persecution. that makes the leaders of the cartels Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican president.

Noboa did not stop there, and added: “The structures are very large, very strong and transnational. And it can be seen that there are even governments that help and cooperate with these transnational criminal structures. But we are not going to allow them to interfere with the country. Ecuador is open to the world, to cooperate for good. But we are never going to cooperate with crime, terrorism, we are never going to cooperate with drug trafficking.” The Ecuadorian president, who has not yet been in power for a year, is basing his government on a very strong discourse on security, like Nayib Byukele in El Salvador. He is currently in direct confrontation with López Obrador after Noboa ordered the assault on the Mexican embassy to arrest Jorge Glas, Rafael Correa's vice president who had received Mexican asylum. The violation of Mexican sovereignty has led to the rupture between the two countries and maximum tension between Noboa and López Obrador.

Military objectives of terrorist groups, classified by levels. #ElNuevoEcuador pic.twitter.com/tFkH717ywz

— Presidency Ecuador 🇪🇨 (@Presidencia_Ec) April 19, 2024

El Mayo is founder, along with

Guzmán, of the Sinaloa cartel, considered by the United States to be the most powerful criminal organization in the world. In February, the Eastern District Court of New York, the same one that sentenced El Chapo to life in prison, imposed new charges on Ismael El Mayo Zambada for manufacturing and distributing fentanyl, a synthetic drug. Zambada, 76, was a key contact for Sinaloan drug traffickers with Colombian cocaine suppliers in the late 1980s. Zambada had a direct connection with Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, Pablo Escobar's number two, leader of the Medellín cartel.

With the arrest of Joaquín el Chapo, El Mayo became the unquestionable and highest-ranking leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. El Mayo has been in the business for half a century without having been arrested, but it has not freed him from being accused of organized crime, conspiracy to commit murder, money laundering and various crimes related to drug trafficking, such as the transfer of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. to the United States, for which he faces criminal accusations in five States: Texas, California, Washington DC, Illinois and New York.

Along with El Mayo, in the first level of military objectives against terrorists of the Ecuadorian Government, there is also alias Araña, a member of the general directorate of the Border Commands, a FARC dissident attached to the Second Marquetalia, of Colombia. In 2010, Araña was sentenced to 29 years in prison for homicide and manufacturing, trafficking and possession of narcotics and firearms. In 2017, Araña was appointed peace manager during the pacification process with the extinct FARC. Thanks to that role, he managed to leave the Cómbita prison, in Boyacá, with conditional freedom, for a period of three months where she decided to rearm herself and thus began the armed group Commando de Frontera.

In the second and third level of the list are nine other names of criminals who have led dangerous criminal gangs in Ecuador. Among these is José Adolfo Macías Villamar, alias Fito, leader of Los Choneros, one of the oldest and most dangerous criminal organizations in Ecuador. Fito, 44, escaped from the Guayaquil Regional Prison in January. The authorities realized that he escaped when a group of soldiers and police entered the prison to carry out an operation to control prohibited objects, and they did not find Fito in his cell. José Adolfo Macías Villamar has 14 judicial proceedings for different crimes, including robbery, organized crime, possession of weapons and murder, which together amounted to the maximum sentence of 34 years in prison, of which he had been held for 12 in the Guayaquil Regional Prison. . It's not the first time he's run away. In February 2013, Fito and 15 other prisoners from the Los Choneros gang, including the group's leader, Jorge Luis Zambrano, escaped from the maximum security prison called La Roca, which is within the same prison complex. For 10 months they were the most wanted criminals in the country, until they were found by the Police. To date, the authorities have not been able to locate Fito to take him back to prison.

The list extends to another 74 criminals as those most wanted by the security axis, who are part of eight criminal groups that have spread terror with violent crimes and car bombs throughout the country. The Government of Daniel Noboa has not clarified the strategy to capture them, nor has it explained why the names of two members of the Los Lobos gang, alias Palanqueta and El Invisible, appear on the payroll, the latter being investigated for hiring the hitmen who murdered the former candidate. Presidential Fernando Villavicencio, who was supposedly in prison