A recent massacre inside Ecuador’s largest and most violent prison is an ominous sign that the country’s multiple criminal organizations are atomizing at a rapid pace as the government’s hardline security crackdown stalls.
The attack happened in the Litoral Penitentiary just outside the coastal city of Guayaquil in the early hours of November 12, when members of a group known as the Duendes (Dwarfs) attacked a rival gang, the Freddy Kruegers, local media reported.
The perpetrators killed at least 17 prisoners and left more than a dozen injured, according to the National Penitentiary Service (Servicio Nacional de Atención a Personas Privadas de la Libertad – SNAI).
Media reported gunshots during the attack, and online newspaper Primicias said that a grenade and seven guns were found on the prison roof in a police sweep following the incident. Images obtained by InSight Crime from sources connected to the prison show the killings were carried out with ferocious brutality, with victims decapitated and disemboweled.
Authorities did not publicly speculate on what motivated the attack, but one organization of prisoners’ families told Primicias that the fight was over food. Prison gangs often exert control over food distribution, charging prisoners as much as $20 per day to eat the meals that contractors provide to the Litoral with government tax dollars. There have reportedly been shortages of food in recent weeks.
The fight for this prison economy – one of many ways that gangs make money inside the penitentiary system – occurred in Wing 3, where the Duendes had reportedly aligned with the Trébol Killer, and the Freddy Kruegers had aligned with the Mafia 18. Other prisoners may have come from other wings to participate in the massacre, various media reported.
Tensions between the groups had been building for some time, a prisoner in Litoral, who did not want to be identified for security reasons, told InSight Crime via text message.
“War was declared in Wing 3 months ago, this is a dispute over territory,” he said.
In the days following the massacre, at least 12 murders were reported in Portete, a Guayaquil neighborhood where the Freddy Kruegers allegedly have a strong presence. Threatening messages also circulated, including a TikTok message claiming to be from the Freddy Kruegers featuring a list of alleged rivals marked for assassination.
“The war is moving to the streets,” said the prisoner.
InSight Crime Analysis
The massacre is the latest in a string of incidents, including the murders of three prison directors, that suggest gangs are reasserting themselves in the prisons after the military was deployed in January to break their control.
The killing in Litoral was the first massacre since the military deployment. Before that, the prisons had witnessed a series of brutal mass killings, which claimed 459 lives between 2021 and 2024, according to figures provided by the Defense Ministry.
The military deployment appeared to disrupt the stranglehold over the prisons of Ecuador’s largest mafias, such as the Choneros and the Lobos, but it also accelerated the atomization of such criminal networks.
The Duendes, the Trébol Killer, the Freddy Kruegers and the Mafia 18 are part of a kaleidoscope of criminal organizations now present both in the prison and on the streets, which were once subsumed under the banners of the larger, more sophisticated Choneros and Lobos but are now emerging from the shadows.
The leader of the Freddy Kruegers, Jhon Steven Navarrete Quiroga, alias “Cuyuyui,” has a long criminal history and was once connected to the Lobos network, but now appears to be operating independently. Their reported allies in the Mafia 18 were, until recently, considered part of the rival Choneros network.
For their part, the Duendes appear to be an alliance between at least two factions inside the Litoral and greater Guayaquil. They reportedly have their origins in Guasmos, another Guayaquil neighborhood in the south of the city notorious for criminality and violence, but have been expanding north in recent months.
Up until recently, the prison authorities divided up such groups into separate wings based on their allegiances to the larger mafias. But when the military took over the administration of Litoral in January, it mixed these organizations across the prison’s 12 wings.
This more fragmented dynamic may represent the next phase in the evolution of these criminal organizations. And the implications for Ecuador are dire.
Other countries that have gone through a similar process, such as Colombia and Mexico, have struggled to contain the spread of violence and criminality as large criminal groups have atomized, leading to political and economic upheaval and mass migration.
In the case of Ecuador, the spike in prison violence has already correlated with a rise in the country’s homicide rate and a huge jump in Ecuadorians fleeing the country. This previous phase of violence was associated with a few larger criminal networks and criminal competition related to the rise in international cocaine trafficking through Ecuador. This new emerging dynamic, though, appears to be driven more by competition over local criminal economies and strategic territories between multiple smaller criminal groups, which, while less powerful, are no less violent.
Just how authorities plan to deal with this fragmenting array of criminal groups is an open question.
Thus far, the interim government of President Daniel Noboa has relied heavily on the military to control its prison mafias. However, the fact that the gangs were able to carry out the killing and that they appear to be once again taking over food distribution raises serious concerns about the role of the military, especially as it comes against a backdrop of worrying signs military forces are falling into the same, corrupt patterns of their predecessors in the prison system.
Furthermore, this approach, which is already showing diminishing returns in the form of rebounding murder rates, is ill-equipped to deal with the more complex dynamic that is now emerging.
Featured Image: Police guard the Litoral prison in Guayaquil, Ecuador, after the massacre. Jose Sanchez / AP
