Major Ecuadorian cocaine, weapons trafficking ring busted in New York
A Ecuadorian-based cocaine and weapons trafficking ring has been broken up in New York.
The network stretches from Columbia and Peru into Ecuador, then into Mexico, Texas and other southwest border states and to New York, where contraband is shipped to Europe, authorities say. The network has been operating in the U.S. for more than a decade.
Five Ecuadorian nationals have been indicted in the Southern District of New York on charges of conspiring to import vast quantities of cocaine into the U.S. through the network.
Those indicted include a former member of Ecuador’s National Assembly, a former Ecuadorian mayor and current mayoral candidate, the son of Ecuador’s former president, among others.
The leaders, Jaime Estrada Medranda and his father, Jaime Estrada Bonilla, two Ecuadorian politicians, were arrested Nov. 2 in Panama. Three other Ecuadorans indicted, Jacobo Abdala Bucaram-Pulley, Geovanny Fernandez Menendez and William Jose Briones Lopez, were arrested Nov. 4 in Ecuador, according to the indictment.
All five Ecuadorans face charges related to importing cocaine into the U.S. and for possessing machine guns. If convicted, they face life in prison.
The charges represent “a coordinated effort to dismantle political corruption and narcotics trafficking that had wreaked havoc in Ecuador and plagued the country with increasing violence in recent years,” U.S. Attorney for the SDNY Jamie McDonald said. The defendants “played a critical role in transforming the country into a major transit hub for 70 percent of the cocaine reaching the United States and Europe. These prosecutions hold accountable powerful politicians and narcotraffickers alike who profited from and facilitated the international narcotics trade and who degraded Ecuador’s internal security.”
Their arrests and indictments come after the Trump administration announced a new international coalition with 14 countries, including Ecuador, to target cartels and transnational crime in the Western Hemisphere, The Center Square reported.
“Ecuador sits at the heart of the global cocaine trade,” McDonald said, including a map of the trade routes in his announcement.
“Cocaine traffickers operating in Ecuador and the broader region exploit legal commercial maritime routes to conceal their narcotics, using container ships and other commercial vessels transporting legitimate commodities, including seafood, bananas, timber, and minerals, as well as an extensive network of fishing vessels and ‘go-fast’ boats, to smuggle cocaine to the United States and other international markets.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Coast Guard are regularly intercepting “go fast” boats, expanding maritime interdiction efforts, The Center Square reported.
Ecuadoran politicians Medranda and Bonilla “have long partnered with some of the region’s largest and most violent drug traffickers to ship massive quantities of cocaine out of Ecuador to the United States and elsewhere, contributing to the deteriorating internal security of Ecuador and the corruption of its political systems,” McDonald said.
In Ecuador’s National Assembly, Medranda represented a district in the Manabi Province, including the coastal city of Manta, one of Ecuador’s largest ports. The port is where the country’s tuna processing industry is based and is known as a “transit point for the global cocaine supply,” McDonald’s office said. Bonilla was the former mayor of Manta and was the former president of the Port Authority of Manta. He and his son own a major Manta-based seafood company and an Ecuadorian professional soccer club.
For years, they smuggled vast quantities of cocaine in seafood exports partnering with large-scale drug traffickers, including the Los Choneros and Los Lobos, according to the charges. The Trump administration designated these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
The father and son used intermediaries to meet with drug traffickers, receive payments and coordinate logistics to receive, pack and smuggle cocaine out of Ecuador, including in tuna exports, according to the charges. One they worked with this year is Ecuadorian drug and firearms trafficker Jacobo Abdala Bucaram-Pulley, the former Ecuadorian president’s son, according to the indictment. The alleged deal involved shipping at least two tons of cocaine to reach the U.S., according to the charges.
The indictment also points to other deals, including one in 2023 using their seafood exporting company to ship ton-quantity loads of cocaine out of Ecuadorian seaports, which was seized by the Ecuadorian National Police.
The indictments come after the greatest number of Ecuadorans illegally entered the U.S. under the Biden administration. At the height of the border crisis in 2023, more than 200,000 Ecuadorans were already on the docket to be deported and hadn’t yet been, The Center Square reported.
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