Crime is shifting from the coasts to the interior of Ecuador, turning quiet cities into hotbeds of violence

Luis — who asked that his real name not be published — had 20 minutes to decide whether or not to flee his captors. Twenty minutes that separate his former life from the one that came afterward. Beside him, two other kidnapping victims remained motionless, paralyzed by fear, unable even to undo the ropes that bound their hands and feet. They had been abandoned by the side of a river after their bank accounts and credit cards had been cleaned out. As he walked away, still dazed, Luis thought about the warning he had received 15 days earlier: not to go out at night, that they already had him “marked.” That day, work required him to travel the so-called ecological route, a seven-kilometer stretch of road between Babahoyo and Quevedo, in west-central Ecuador. Today, both cities are among the most dangerous in the world.

According to the annual ranking by the Mexican organization Citizen Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, which compiles a list of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world, six Ecuadorian cities will appear among the top 10 in 2025. Babahoyo appears on the list for the first time as the second most violent, with 166 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Machala ranks fourth; Quevedo, fifth; the center of Manabí province, seventh; and Guayaquil, for decades synonymous with its port and crime, eighth. The violence in Ecuador has not decreased: the map has changed.

A decade ago, in the main cities of Los Ríos, El Oro, and Manabí, the homicide rate did not exceed 15 per 100,000 inhabitants. Today, it is three or four times higher. The increase has been abrupt.

Luis was born in Quevedo, in the agricultural province of Los Ríos. He grew up surrounded by banana, plantain, and coffee farms. “We want to think that life goes on as usual, but we no longer have that peaceful life we ​​once had,” he says months after the kidnapping. In his family, crime became routine. His 75-year-old father-in-law was also kidnapped. They paid a ransom. During the handover, the criminals sent a 12-year-old boy to collect the money while armed men kept watch from nearby bushes and vehicles. They released him two days later on a secondary road. He hadn’t even recovered from the conditions of his captivity when they returned to his house and started shooting. “It seems there was a miscalculation of the ransom, and they came back for more,” Luis summarizes. It was then that part of the family separated and migrated elsewhere until things calmed down.

In Los Ríos province, travel has become a negotiation. Before using certain roads, many people ask permission from the gangs or pay the “vaccine”: an informal “protection” fee for using public highways. The government offers a different narrative. On February 26, President Daniel Noboa visited Quevedo to deliver eight tractors to agricultural cooperatives. In a four-minute speech, he asserted that his government has confronted crime and that the indicators are improving.

The official narrative and everyday reality

But after the presidential entourage had left the city, one of the tractors was stolen and three farmers were kidnapped on the Jauneche-Mocache road, a highway described by locals as territory controlled by gangs. When the case went viral on social media, an operation involving 300 soldiers and helicopters recovered the machinery and rescued the farmers. The incident highlighted the irony of life in Ecuador: the conflict between the official narrative and everyday reality.

The Global Organized Crime Index, which measures the intensity of illicit markets and their actors on a scale of one to 10, gives Ecuador a score of 7.48 for crime in 2025, almost two points above the regional average (6.13). The country is no longer just a corridor; it has become a contested territory.

The drug trade is undoubtedly one of the main drivers of this violence, which has now spread to the provinces. The ports of Guayaquil and Esmeraldas, which for years were the main gateways for Ecuadorian drugs, are no longer the only players in this story. But in the last five years, the fragmentation of gangs and state pressure in certain areas have pushed these groups into new territories, explains Renato Rivera, director of the Ecuadorian Observatory of Organized Crime. Los Ríos and El Oro, with their interconnection through the moutainous Sierra region and the Amazon, have become some of the new arteries of drug trafficking, territories disputed by gangs that not only traffic drugs but also expand through kidnappings and extortion. The violence has become more fragmented and has reached new regions.

“The violence in Los Ríos is related to the significant flow of trade and what it represents for the formal economy,” Rivera explains. “In cities where there is a concentration of commerce, there is also criminal strife,” he maintains. In his view, provinces like Los Ríos and El Oro, in the south, have become logistical hubs: warehouses, routes, enclaves. And Manabí and Esmeraldas, in the north, are being exploited because of the large number of fishing and artisanal ports through which drugs are being smuggled out with little effort at state control.

In Babahoyo, Verónica — a pseudonym — measures the pulse of fear in the clothing store where she works. “People don’t go out at night anymore, they don’t go to parties or bars. And if they don’t go out, they don’t buy anything,” she says. Consumption reflects this retreat. The greatest fear isn’t just robbery, but chance: sitting next to someone targeted by a gang and getting caught in the crossfire. “We’ve become distrustful of everyone. When I leave my house, I don’t even say hello anymore. I don’t know if that makes me suspicious,” she laments. On the Ecuadorian coast, confinement has become a form of survival, as has avoiding eye contact and concealing one’s identity in a society that has begun to lower its voice.

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