Ecuador’s Farm Belt Becomes The Deadliest Link In The Cocaine Chain

Key Points

• Once a calm agricultural province, Los Ríos now has Ecuador’s highest murder rate as gangs fight over cocaine routes.
• Local splinter groups feed a larger war between national crime organisations, pushing violence into towns and highways.
• A major military deployment has slowed killings, but lasting security will depend on stronger institutions and legal trade.

Los Ríos, a province better known for bananas and rivers than for bullets, has become Ecuador’s most violent territory. So far in 2025 it has registered roughly 1,041 killings, an estimated homicide rate of 106 murders per 100,000 people.

For residents, that figure translates into bodies on roadsides, empty classrooms and shuttered shops. The cause is geography as much as governance.

Los Ríos sits between the northern corridors where cocaine enters and the Pacific ports where it leaves in shipping containers, often hidden in legal exports.

The scale is stark: in early 2024 security forces found 22 tonnes of cocaine in one rural hideout near Vinces, exposing the province as a key link in the global supply chain serving markets in the Americas and Europe.

Over the past two years, the national gangs Los Choneros and Los Lobos have turned Los Ríos into a battlefield. They subcontract smaller groups like Los R7 and Los Pájaros Locos, while offshoots such as Los Tiguerones seek their own slice.

What began as prison-based rivalries has spilled into highways, farms and market towns, bringing kidnappings, forced “tolls” and systematic extortion of truckers and small businesses.

Faced with a state losing control, the current government has pushed back. Since late November 1,500 soldiers have been deployed across all 13 cantons of Los Ríos.

Daily killings, which had peaked near 14 a day, have fallen, and at least 25 suspects have been arrested, including 12 considered high-value targets linked to explosives, weapons and trafficking.

The deeper test will be whether this tougher line is backed by lasting reforms: cleaner local politics, tighter port controls and economic alternatives to the drug economy.

Los Ríos is a warning that when institutions are weak and crime is quietly tolerated, violence does not stay confined to the margins for long.