Ecuadorian Latin Kings Sought Peace, Waged Crime

On July 21, 2014, Ecuadorian police were searching a residential area in the north of the coastal city of Guayaquil when they spotted their target. Carlos Manuel Macías Saverio, alias “King Diablo,” was wanted for illegal possession of a firearm.

Diablo — who has soft, brown skin, large ears, a long nose, and deep-set eyes — saw the officers and ran into a two-story home, the police later reported. The police called a prosecutor, so they could legally access the residency and arrest their suspect.

At the time of the sting, Diablo was a national leader of the Latin Kings in Guayaquil. The gang, whose roots stretched back seventy years to Chicago’s Latino neighborhoods, had been in Ecuador for two decades. While they had initially built a reputation for organizing music concerts and cultural events, they’d more recently come to be known for violence and criminality.

But along with several other street gangs, the Latin Kings were participating in what was loosely termed pacificación, or “pacification.” Pacification was a means by which so-called “street youth organizations” could integrate into mainstream society. And, to an extent, it was working: Homicides were falling; gang members were getting full-time jobs; they were going to trade schools and universities; and they were drifting away from the criminal side of the group.

However, pacification was complex and dynamic. The Latin Kings, for instance, had thousands of members throughout Ecuador. There were tensions and rivalries within the organization, some of which were based on geography, others on age and personality, and still others on strategic differences about how to survive as Ecuador began its transformation into a cocaine superhighway to Europe run by hyper-violent prison gangs.

Some of the group’s leaders, including its top leader in Quito, openly supported pacification. Another Latin King would later use the process to enter politics and would eventually become a congressman, much to the chagrin of some of his counterparts, who twinged when they saw him being used as a political prop for the president. 

Diablo, however, was circumspect. He’d been a Latin King leader from its first days in Ecuador. And while he participated in the organization’s meetings, often lauding the positive side of pacification, he also kept his underworld businesses going.

In a way, Diablo encapsulated the Latin Kings’ primary dilemma: How do you embrace pacification in a place where most people think you should be in jail and other criminal groups want to destroy you?

For Diablo, that meant working all the angles, including getting illegal weapons and peddling drugs. That was why the police were now waiting outside his residence in the northern part of Guayaquil.

When the prosecutor arrived, the police entered. Inside a baby carriage on the first floor, they said they found $1,065 in cash. On top of the refrigerator, they found a plastic bag with a dark substance, which they presumed was illegal drugs. They also found a scale, a fake ID, and seven cellular telephones, including four Blackberries. 

Upstairs in the master, authorities found another $6,085 in cash, seven cellular phone chips, a watch with a black leather band, and two yellow chains, one of which had an image of Jesus Christ dangling from it. And in an adjacent room, they found judicial documents related to a 2008-case against Diablo, as well as a magazine for a weapon and eighteen 9-millimeter cartridges. 

The police read Diablo his rights and arrested him.

The Beginning of Pacification

Pacification in Ecuador traced its roots to similar processes in New York in the late 1990s, and Genoa and Barcelona in the early 2000s. The New York process was led by a charismatic, ex-convict. Antonio Fernández, or “King Tone,” as he is known, was a self-professed street hustler, drug dealer, and drug addict before becoming a Latin King in prison in the early 1990s. Once released, he joined the New York “tribe” where Tone rose through the ranks. And in 1996, following a bloody internal fight, Tone took over the New York state Latin Kings.

One of Tone’s early disciples in New York was Diablo. The two began a relationship that would continue for decades. A Latin King leader in Guayaquil told InSight Crime that Tone was Diablo’s “padrino,” or “godfather,” the name given to the person who administers the baptism of a new member in a group ceremony. And, at times, Diablo worked as Tone’s bodyguard in New York.

Diablo also got in trouble. In January 2001, he was arrested in Queens, pled guilty of grand larceny and robbery, and was given a “conditional discharge,” thereby releasing him. In July 2003, he was arrested in Brooklyn, pled guilty to criminal possession of a loaded weapon and sentenced to six months in prison. The New York state records InSight Crime obtained do not say where he served time, but one high-ranking Latin King told InSight Crime that he was on Rikers Island, the infamous New York jail, before being deported. The experience jaded him, the high-ranking Latin King told InSight Crime, in part because his case was based on information provided to authorities by a fellow Latin King.

Diablo was part of the early waves of Latin Kings that were bouncing back and forth between the US and Ecuador where they set up fledgling, unauthorized branches of the group in cities like Guayaquil and Quito. It was a tumultuous period for the Ecuadorian Latin Kings. Two factions – one with New York origins and the other with Chicago origins – were fighting for control. Each claimed supremacy, but neither had permission to “plant the flag,” according to a deeply-researched academic study on the group, until “King Diablo,” as one member referred to him, brought with him a letter from New York authorizing the formation of the Sacred Tribe of Atahualpa of Ecuador (Sagrada Tribu de Atahualpa de Ecuador – STAE). The event was also chronicled in the Latin Kings’ Ecuador Bible, the organization’s founding document.

The New York faction had won, and its influence spread, in part because of Tone’s work in New York City. There, prior to Diablo’s deportation, Tone had led a dramatic transformation of the Latin Kings, connecting with civil society and religious organizations to set up job training, education programs, and social services. The process, however, was short-circuited, when Tone faced federal charges for drug trafficking and was convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison. This too, jaded Diablo, the same high-ranking Latin King told InSight Crime, in large part because Diablo, and many others, thought Tone was unfairly targeted by the government.

Still, Tone’s experiment would reverberate in Barcelona, Genoa, and, finally, Ecuador, where a similar experiment would dramatically alter the landscape for the Latin Kings and Diablo. At the forefront of the Ecuadorian pacification were Mauro Cerbino and Ana Rodríguez, two scholars from the regional academic cohort of social scientists focusing on Latin America known by its Spanish acronym Flacso (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales). Both were meeting regularly with other, like-minded scholars, including David Brotherton and Luis Barrios, who had chronicled the New York process in real time and later paired up to write the seminal book on it.

While these academics differed on how to describe these processes – in conversations with InSight Crime, they oscillated between “pacification,” “legalization,” “recognition,” and “dialogue” – they all agreed it was far more productive to try to integrate the gangs than imprison or destroy them. In fact, many of these scholars did not just write about these processes, they played instrumental roles in them. Barrios, who is also an Episcopalian priest, lent his church in Manhattan to the Latin Kings for their monthly meetings in the late 1990s, which included baptism ceremonies that Tone administered. Diablo, for example, was baptized into the Latin Kings by Tone in Barrios’ church.

Cerbino and Rodríguez also played active roles in pacification. In their case, they shared the Barcelona, Genoa, and New York experiences with the Quito government, where the academics found allies in the mayor’s office and city council. The Flacso team they formed soon became de facto mediators between various would-be gang participants and their government counterparts, as they sought to push this new approach into the political realm.

SEE ALSO: Kings, Killers, and Cabras: Profiling Durán’s Criminal Players

The efforts in Quito coincided with others in Guayaquil where local civil society organizations, City Hall, and the police were facilitating soccer matches and promoting peace talks between the Latin Kings and their chief rivals, the Ñetas. The problem was urgent: The Latin Kings, according to one estimate, were responsible for as much as a quarter of all murders in Guayaquil, the country’s homicide epicenter. But in 2006, the Latin Kings and the Ñetas signed a non-aggression pact at the behest of a Church-backed youth organization.

The fledgling processes in Quito and Guayaquil were eventually embraced by the newly elected president, Rafael Correa. Correa – who had come to power in 2007 amidst a wave of progressive, left-leaning presidents in the region – sought like-minded allies. And, on paper, the Latin Kings were in line with his worldview. The organization’s internal manifestos are littered with anti-colonial, anti-racism, and pro-Puerto Rican independence messages.

“The time for revolution is at hand,” one Latin King Bible reads. “Yes, revolution — a revolution of the mind! The revolution of knowledge! A revolution that will bring freedom to the enslaved, to all third world people as we together sing and praise with joy what time it is — it’s Nation time!”

Correa leaned into this idea, and his party, Alianza PAIS (Country Alliance), would soon try to co-opt the Latin Kings on a massive level. But Correa, an economist with a PhD. from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, also appreciated the academic nuance and understood how to reframe the issue. His government, for example, eschewed the word “gangs,” instead referring to the Latin Kings as “la nación,” or “the nation,” just as they refer to themselves. 

Correa himself also downplayed the Latin Kings’ menacing reputation.

“The Latin Kings remind me a lot of the Boy Scouts,” the president famously said after a meeting with gang leaders in August 2007. “With their principles, their laws, and their brotherhood. They have those principles of honor.”

The meeting included a celebratory lunch: The government was granting the Latin Kings non-profit status. From then on, they would be registered as a non-governmental organization, the Corporation of Kings and Queens of Ecuador (Corporación de Reyes Latinos y Reinas Latinas del Ecuador). 

Pacification had begun.

A Divided Latin Kings

In September 2008, around 8:30 p.m., Ecuadorian police spotted a man outside a nightclub with a pistol strapped to his waist. The police used the pretext to raid the nightclub, where they found Diablo with an unlicensed Glock and arrested him. He was booked and charged for illegal possession of a handgun.

By then, the police had identified Diablo as the “maximum leader” of the Latin Kings, and he would go on to serve a year in prison, but no one seemed to notice. It was just a few months after Correa’s infamous Boy Scouts-comment, and there was no media coverage of the incident or commentary from pundits about the seeming hypocrisy.

These early years were arguably the high point of pacification. It was not just that the media was ignoring seemingly contradictory transgressions by gang leaders like Diablo. The Latin Kings were also interacting with local and national government operatives and working with universities and civil society organizations. One of the early events was a Reggaeton concert in Quito in November 2007, the first of five yearly concerts they organized. Brotherton, who first visited Ecuador in 2007, said the gang members were “brimming with enthusiasm and hope,” at the time.

“They had such a belief in what they were doing and confidence with dealing with official society, dealing with politicos at the local level, that I’d never seen before,” he said.

Part of this early success came from the timing. With control over nearly every aspect of government, Correa’s political movement was at its apex. Prices for oil, an Ecuadorian economic mainstay, were also booming. But part of this early success was also related to the Latin Kings’ structure, which mirrors that of most non-profits. The Latin Kings, for instance, have a clear hierarchy, as well as rules and regulations, which they assiduously document and follow, as was clear when Diablo arrived with his authorization letter to establish the organization in Ecuador. The structure and documentation made it easy to draw up bylaws for the Corporation, as well as create fluid communication channels.

Quickly, however, different factions of the Latin Kings emerged. While they did organize cultural events, the dynamic in Quito, for example, was also practical and entrepreneurial, with a focus on education, job training, and support for small businesses. Its leader was the Latin Kings’ national representative, Manuel Zúñiga, alias “King Majestic.” Majestic wore glasses, had a soft Fu Manchu-style beard, and a broad body that sometimes filled out flashy black and yellow Latin Kings baseball jerseys.

“The first new thing for me was the word ‘brother,’” he told the BBC about his attraction to the Latin Kings in an interview years after the pacification process began. “They treated each other like brothers. A family. And I liked that.”

Majestic had spent time in jail, and he told the BBC that inside prison he was nearly killed. Upon release, he said, he decided that he needed to “have a more open mind towards seeking change.” For Majestic, that would eventually lead to a catering company that he opened with the help of the local Catholic university.

SEE ALSO: Ecuador ‘Legalizes’ Gangs and Slashes Murder Rate

This branch of the Latin Kings was known as the “Corporation,” for the name the group took when it incorporated as a non-profit before the August 2007-meeting with Correa. And during the first few years, the Corporation was, for all intents and purposes, the heart and soul of the pacification program, working closely with Flacso and the Quito government. But resources were thin, and the Corporation, in spite of its name, never really took off financially. 

The dynamic in Guayaquil was more opaque, contentious, and clientelistic. Some leaders in Guayaquil, for example, were upset that the Corporation might be giving the government and the academics too much information about their internal operations and leadership. Such disputes had led to violence in other places, including New York and Barcelona.

Others thought the Corporation was hoarding government resources. Eventually, according to Latin King members and people who participated in the process, a Guayaquil-based faction decided to create its own organization, and in 2009, the Association of Latin Kings and Queens of Ecuador (Asociación de Reyes Latinos y Reinas Latinas de Ecuador) obtained legal status.

Notwithstanding the feud, municipal and federal government agencies interacted with the Latin Kings as if they were one. Yet, the two sides came to blows, according to two high-ranking members of the Latin Kings. No one in the Latin Kings provided any specific examples of violence, but one Quito-based leader told InSight Crime he regularly felt under “threat,” especially when he was in Guayaquil.

Meanwhile, numerous other Latin King leaders, among them Diablo, maintained their criminal schemes. Even after the pacification process began, Diablo was, according to judicial documents, “involved in various crimes like assassinations, robberies, and drug trafficking in various parts of Guayaquil.”

Numerous outsiders who worked on pacification or studied it closely mentioned Diablo. He was an ominous presence, especially in Guayaquil where he held significant power. And while it was known he was involved in criminal activities, it was also a topic no one broached, at least publicly. For the Latin Kings, each member can do what they want on their own time, members told InSight Crime, as long as they do not do it in the name of the organization.

“You can be an engineer,” the Guayaquil Latin King leader said, employing a more benign example than what Diablo represented. “But you cannot be a Latin King engineer.”

Diablo, the Peacemaker

Diablo’s relationship with pacification was complex. He understood the political power of the process. After he was arrested in 2008, for example, he asked a judge for “forgiveness,” the judicial documents say, and then expressed his “desire to reintegrate into society and do something good for the community.”

Diablo also attended some of the events and meetings, one person who participated in the pacification process told InSight Crime. In his dissertation, for example, Cerbino wrote in field notes that Diablo and two other leaders spoke to some 400 Latin Kings during a national meeting, invoking the “hope that they would be successful.”

And Diablo never turned his back on the Latin Kings or its leaders, regardless of how he felt personally about them or how cynically he viewed the process. This included a deep respect and admiration for Majestic, whose enthusiasm for pacification reminded him of his New York padrino, Tone. Diablo had also been close to Majestic’s brother, who’d been assassinated.  

“He had a kind of ethic, you know. This idea of honor that is so strong,” the person who participated in the process said. “A big part of his internal recognition (in the Latin Kings) comes from that kind of idea of respect, commitment; admiration and respect for the values of the crown.”

But Diablo was also skeptical, in part because of what had happened to Tone, and in part because he had to face a more confrontational environment. He made his headquarters in Durán, a municipality of over 300,000 people that sits across the Guayas River from Guayaquil. The area is known for its now-dormant train station, which once facilitated the flow of goods through the region to the various ports that connect Ecuador to the global economy.

SEE ALSO: A Short History of Durán, Ecuador

But unlike Chicago, whose status as a production and transport hub eventually made it a burgeoning city, Durán never got beyond its role as a service provider, and an industrial zone with cheap labor and storage. The gritty, underdeveloped backdrop made it a perfect incubator for gangs. Flacso’s Cerbino and Rodríguez would call this type of space a “symbolic parallel order,” a reference to the criminal governance created by organizations like the Latin Kings when the state is not present. 

The Latin Kings and Ñetas proliferated in Durán, then fought, sometimes against each other, sometimes among themselves. In one particularly macabre incident in 2011, for example, members of the Latin Kings, among them Diablo, chased down, shot in the leg, and then beat to death a 22-year-old man who allegedly sought to quit the organization, presumably without permission. Three Latin Kings were convicted for the murder and sentenced each to 25 years in prison, but Diablo escaped prosecution.

Still, behind the leadership of Majestic and others, violence began dropping nationwide after pacification began. The dynamics are complex and not easily boiled down into straight-forward formulas, but part of the success of pacification was to convince leaders like Diablo to slow the fighting in his areas of influence, among them Durán, where homicides were beginning what would be a four-fold drop.

Of course, the government had to be strategic about how they sold these ceasefires to the groups themselves. According to Luis Varese, who worked with the Ministry of the Interior in the mid-2010s, the government organized meetings between the Latin Kings and other gangs, where they divvied up their territories. 

“This division of space was part of their agreements,” he told InSight Crime.  

For a while, the agreements worked, and leaders like Diablo kept up the efforts to keep the peace between the street gangs, participants in the process and Latin Kings told InSight Crime. 

“Nothing is done without the approval of the leaders,” the Quito-based Latin King told InSight Crime when asked about the drop in homicides.

Contradictions Grow

Throughout, the pacification process continued in fits and starts with a paltry budget and little visibility. Flacso drifted away around 2009. Some who worked with the program from Flacso said they were demoralized by the lack of federal government commitment. The government also changed leadership frequently.

The Latin Kings continued to petition the government for small donations, but problems within the organization also grew. The two public wings of the Latin Kings – the Corporation and the Association – continued their open, and sometimes violent, fight. And in Guayaquil, Diablo maintained his criminal activities. 

In the meantime, a thick, short-haired, ambitious young man with movie-star looks and a sharp tongue named Ronny Aleaga emerged in Guayaquil. Aleaga was a wild card. He claimed to be a Latin King but remained largely unknown to those in the Corporation. It’s not even clear if he had ties to the Association in Guayaquil. But he eventually leveraged his political contacts in his hometown to start working with Alianza País, Correa’s political party, and ingratiate himself with the president.

By then, Alianza País was openly cajoling Latin Kings to join the party. Alexandra Zumárraga – who worked on pacification prior to becoming the director of Social Rehabilitation (Rehabilitación Social) at the Ministry of Justice from 2010 to 2011 – said the party would sign up members at their events. 

“There was never an event where (Correa’s political party) did not have a table,” she told InSight Crime. “And so, you realize, they’re using them.”  

Zumárraga and the person who worked in the process said the party also used the Latin Kings as “shock troops” during marches and public events, and media reported they were being contracted for this express purpose. It was a way to send a message, they said, that the party was not to be pushed around. Luis Varese, who worked with the Ministry of the Interior from 2014 to 2016, said Latin Kings did join the party and did clash with opposition parties, but he disputed they had been contracted.

“That’s a lie,” he told InSight Crime.

In either case, Correa seemed to relish in this image, donning Latin King beads in photographs with the burly Aleaga – who boasts that he is a “boxer” on his X profile – by his side.

Zumárraga said she soon realized the Latin King leaders might be using the government as well. The government would regularly hand out checks for concerts, childcare facilities, and soccer fields, she said. But these financial disbursements for the pacification program faced little, if any, scrutiny.

“That money was never accounted for,” she claimed. “It was just to keep the leaders happy.”

Latin Kings consulted for this report strongly disputed these assertions, as did many of those who studied it closely and some who worked on it. Varese, who worked on pacification several years after Zumárraga, said the pacification grants he saw were paltry sums – in the hundreds or low-thousands of dollars – for small programs. And some of the beneficiaries told InSight Crime they’d used the money to start small businesses that were still running today, often employing scores of ex-gang members.

Other efforts were also showing results. In Durán, Mayor Alexandra Arce (2014-2019), herself a member of Alianza País, employed dozens of Latin Kings in her administration. They did everything from street cleaning to administrative work, she told InSight Crime. Other municipalities did the same. 

Homicides were also down significantly, going from 18 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010, to 9 per 100,000 in 2014, according to Ministry of the Interior data. That same year in Durán, there were 20 homicides total, the most peaceful year in at least a decade.

Still, the critiques continued, with Correa’s polarizing politics partially fueling the vitriol. Perhaps the most damning, and demonstrable, criticism of pacification was that gang leaders used the process to position themselves to move up the criminal ladder. One of them was Leandro Norero, a mid-ranking Ñetas member who became a powerful drug trafficker and money launderer after participating in the pacification process. Norero would later allegedly leverage his government contacts, among them Aleaga, to advance his business interests and manipulate the justice system.

These criminal contradictions were also evident in the Latin Kings, especially after Diablo was captured, charged, and incarcerated in 2014, following the police operation on his northern Guayaquil domicile. But as Diablo entered prison, he quickly realized he, and the Latin Kings, had bigger problems, which would soon put the entire organization at risk.

Diablo, the Dealmaker

Diablo was incarcerated in Litoral, Ecuador’s most populous and dangerous prison. Litoral housed some of the country’s most powerful criminal groups, among them the Choneros, then an up-and-coming prison gang. These were not Boy Scouts working on pacification. These were hard-core criminals seeking to position themselves in the highly competitive cocaine market that was beginning to explode in Ecuador. 

In some ways, being in prison played into Diablo’s hands: He could forge relationships with other criminals and criminal organizations, and he could foster loyalty among the more criminal side of the Latin Kings, especially by taking advantage of the opportunities inside prison. In Litoral, for example, Latin Kings leaders controlled 3 of the prison’s 12 wings, according to two members of the Latin Kings and media reports from the time. In practice, that meant those leaders could collect huge proceeds – in the hundreds of thousands or even millions per year – from extortion, contraband, and drug sales in those wings. One person who was in Litoral in 2016, who was not a Latin King, told InSight Crime that he regularly paid extortion to the Latin Kings who ran his wing.

“And if you don’t pay, they beat you,” he said, adding that they also withheld food as a means of pressuring him.

But Diablo also faced a dilemma. He entered prison just as the Choneros were trying to co-opt smaller gangs and incorporate them into a national alliance. Many gangs were falling in line, but the Latin Kings resisted. Just how they did this is not easy to decipher. The Quito-based Latin King who spoke with InSight Crime said Diablo was able to forge “basic agreements of survival,” without going into any detail.

But the other high-ranking Latin King said Diablo used pacification as a cover – a way to prove the Latin Kings were not a threat. Specifically, he said Diablo began “guaranteeing to the cartels that we were politically involved and not looking for street cred and dope cred…so not messing with their business.”

“We’re not taking the jail to run drugs,” the high-ranking Latin King said, paraphrasing what Diablo told larger criminal groups in jail.

Tone, the New York leader, also visited Diablo in prison. A photo from this time shows the two arm-in-arm at the back of a semicircle of other Latin Kings. By then, Tone had been released from prison in the US and was on the verge of establishing a non-governmental organization to help at-risk youth. In Ecuador, Tone and Diablo met with prison gang leaders to reassure them they were not encroaching on their territory, the same Latin King leader told InSight Crime. Furthermore, they assured the prison gangs that any Latin King who was trafficking drugs was doing it in their own name, and not in the name of the Nation.

But the Latin Kings also had to show strength. Part of that was collecting extortion and running contraband and drugs in the pavilions. But part of it was recruitment, which soared in the prisons, according to the Quito-based Latin King and the person who worked on pacification. And at one point, according to two Guayaquil-based Latin Kings who spoke with InSight Crime, when several Choneros’ allies threatened the Latin Kings, Diablo gave them a choice: peace or all-out war.

“We are gentlemen of peace,” the Guayaquil-based Latin King told InSight Crime. “But we are demons of war.” 

The prison gangs backed down, but the Latin Kings would not be able to avoid conflict for long. This was most evident in Durán, where tensions were rising. The conflict was part internal, part external. Durán-based Latin Kings were worried about how the fighting in the prisons could spill into the streets. They had reason to be concerned: Some members of their former rivals, the Ñetas, were getting ready to join the Choneros. 

To deal with this potential conflict, the Durán-based leaders sought a more confrontational approach, but the national leadership resisted, several members of the Latin Kings told InSight Crime. After all, they were still in pacification mode and using pacification to show the Choneros they were not encroaching on their territory. Soon, the Durán-based leadership of the Latin Kings was going rogue, and the only leader who could keep a lid on the potential violence, these members said, was Diablo.

Desperate, the Latin Kings mounted a lobbying campaign to get him released early. Majestic led the effort, according to the high-ranking Latin King and the Guayaquil Latin King, talking to contacts in the Correa government. At one point, they fashioned T-shirts inscribed with the words, “Free Diablo,” as if he were Nelson Mandela. 

Others also lobbied, including Tone, the New York-based Latin King leader and Diablo’s padrino. During a 2014 visit, Tone attended a countrywide meeting of the Latin Kings, during which he told a cameraperson filming the event, “May God take care of my little Devil. May He bring him back soon, so he can be with us. I miss him, and I love him.”

He then addressed Diablo directly: “You’re part of this process, and we will never forget you.”

From the court records, it’s not clear if authorities released Diablo early because of this campaign. But there is one aspect of the case that remains unexplained. When authorities tested the dark substance they had found in the plastic bag in the house in 2014, it came back positive for “COCAINE, with a weight of 199 grams.” 

For this charge, Diablo got a one-year sentence, when the legal code called for a five-to-seven year sentence. And in January 2016, after 550 days in prison, he was released. The government also returned $7,150 and the jewelry it had confiscated that evening. Not long afterward, Diablo was back, lording over Durán. But things were already starting to spin out of control.

The End of Pacification

By 2017, homicides in Ecuador had dropped to 6 per 100,000, according to ministry of interior data, a resounding illustration for some prominent academics that pacification was a success, a counter-example to the mano dura, or hardline, policies that dominate security strategies in the region. The three-fold drop since 2010, they said, was a byproduct of economic and social programs, such as organizing music concerts and sporting events, and interacting with police and politicians without fear of persecution, all of which were helping to erase the lines of the symbolic parallel order.

“Essentially, legalization opened a political space for entire gangs to transform their organizations and themselves,” Brotherton and another scholar, Rafael Gude, wrote in an assessment of the effort published in the journal of Critical Criminology. “In addition, it afforded the gangs and its members a new political agency with which the group could reinvent itself.”

But these successes could not cover up the Latin Kings’ internal contradictions or stop the coming onslaught of prison-gang violence. After Diablo was released in 2016, he returned to Durán and picked up where he’d left off: selling drugs in the area, among other criminal ventures. And although the Latin Kings’ national leader, Majestic, was still trying to keep the peace, he could do little to stop Diablo from what Brotherton euphemistically called the “informal economy.” 

“Majestic…had to kind of compromise with him,” Brotherton told InSight Crime about the complicated relationship between the two leaders. “He didn’t want to go to war with him, and Diablo was very powerful.”

Diablo was also rich. Majestic, meanwhile, was struggling financially. The contrast was stark, especially in the hypermasculine environment of the Latin Kings.

“We usually deal with the alpha male who could connect us to a place where we could make ourselves feel like we’re productive, and Diablito knows that that leader needs income, and he knew that Majestic’s weakness was his financial status,” the high-ranking Latin King told InSight Crime. “Nobody respects a … broke man. Imagine a broke leader.”

The continued duality of the Latin Kings led to confusion and fear in places like Durán, especially when the Latin Kings held large meetings in public parks. To the residents, it looked like a giant gang meeting. But the Latin Kings, via their respective Corporation and Association, maintained legal status; some of them were working with the municipality, and Aleaga was, by 2017, an alternate congressperson.

In 2018, when the person who’d picked him as an alternate had to step down, Aleaga became the first known Latin King congressperson. His political activities immediately put many other Latin King members on edge. In addition to flashing gang signs with Correa for social media posts, some said Aleaga broke the sacred axiom of keeping his personal and his Latin Kings’ business separate. In the middle of one of his interventions on the legislative floor, for example, he paused his speech to put on a black and yellow beaded necklace and declared his allegiance to the organization. It would soon get worse when he became enmeshed in a sweeping criminal investigation.

Ecuador’s political situation was also in upheaval. Correa’s handpicked successor, Lenín Moreno, took office in 2017. But the two fought, and after a few months, Moreno began charting his own path. Among Moreno’s decisions was to immediately distance his government from pacification, which people would soon start to unfairly blame for the rising violence in the prisons. 

Without government backing, Majestic and those in the Corporation understood that their hopes of pulling the Latin Kings into the light were effectively over. They had no more political or financial cards to play to keep the Latin Kings engaged in the process. The group began to splinter even more.

Moreno also dissolved the Ministry of Justice, which led to slashes in the prison budget. He restructured its administration and training, and he openly fought with the police top brass. What was already a bad situation in the prison system became even worse, as the prison gangs began to fight among themselves. Beginning in 2019, prison massacres followed, to which the president declared a state of emergency.

But it was too late. The fighting inside the prisons was spilling into the streets, where, in places like Durán, there was no pacification program that could keep a lid on it. A faction of the Ñetas from Durán had converted into a hit squad for the Choneros. They called themselves the Chone Killers, and in 2020, they launched a series of attacks on the Latin Kings. It was the beginning of a fight that would help make Durán one of the country’s most violent municipalities. As battles intensified, it was clear there would be no more internal debates: Diablo’s side of the Latin Kings would have to mobilize if the organization wanted to survive the onslaught.

These fights soon moved to Quito where every criminal group – small and large – was being told they needed to pick a side. By then, there were a half-dozen sides. It was not just the Choneros. There were the Lagartos, the Tiguerones, and the Lobos, to name just a few. Some Latin Kings reportedly resisted, including Majestic, the proud leader of the socio-political wing of the organization, who told confidants at the time that he worried about his safety. Some of these confidants said they tried to get him out of the country but without success.

Tensions rose, and on May 9, 2022, the Latin Kings reportedly clashed with the Lobos in a public park in Quito. The next day, Majestic, his partner, and their dog were intercepted by armed men as they drove their red Renault Sandero through the eastern part of the city. After the car took numerous bullets, Majestic swerved into a pole where the men stopped their vehicle, got out, and continued to shoot. In all, 20 bullet casings were found at the scene, and everyone in the car, including the dog, was dead.

The era of pacification was over.

The ‘Apocalypse’

Majestic’s murder was never solved. While most of the theories focused on the Lobos, there were others who blamed the Choneros. The Latin Kings InSight Crime consulted for this report were not willing to publicly speculate who was behind his murder, but one former Ñeta told InSight Crime that it came down to Majestic’s refusal to work for the prison gangs. 

“He always wanted to maintain their name,” the Ñeta said, referring to Majestic’s loyalty to the Latin Kings and the pride he took in their independence. “He didn’t want to see it disappear like the Ñetas had.”

His murder left the organization in disarray. The Corporation is dead, and its top adherents are in hiding. 

“We are living an apocalypse,” the Quito-based Latin King, who keeps an exceedingly low profile, said.

The Association is also dead, and Aleaga is in hiding. He lost his US visa and fled the country after a journalist-turned presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, released a photograph of him with a suspected drug trafficker who was an associate of Leandro Norero. Villavicencio was later assassinated in an unprecedented bloody campaign season.

Norero, the Ñeta who’d leveraged his participation in the pacification process to become a large-scale drug trafficker and money launderer, was captured and later killed in prison. The subsequent scandal provoked by his case file – which includes hundreds of text messages and other private communications – has enveloped judges, prosecutors, and politicians, including Aleaga, because of his own communications with Norero. Aleaga refused InSight Crime’s request for an interview, although in his social media posts, he too has denied any involvement in criminal activity.

SEE ALSO: Metastasis Case Exposes Ecuador’s Corruption Cancer

The case may also have implications for Diablo’s own judicial process. The prosecutor from Diablo’s 2014-drug case, for which he received his light sentence, assisted Norero and his family while he was sick with Covid and admitted to having one of his houses in her name. 

These days, authorities insist that Diablo is the top leader of the Latin Kings. But some Latin Kings have tried to distance themselves from him. One Latin King told InSight Crime that Diablo was just an “advisor.” 

“We consult with him, but he is not the leader,” the Guayaquil-based Latin King told InSight Crime. “What he does – that’s personal,” he added, referring to his criminal activities.

But other Latin Kings say Diablo is the de facto leader, whether he wants to be or not. There was some irony to this. The high-ranking Latin King said that he once told Diablo that he needed Majestic, that they were the “Ying and Yang” of the Latin Kings, and that Majestic had kept the focus away from him, so he could do his criminal activities.

“Now that there’s no leader, Diablito is the leader,” the Latin King said.

Diablo may have also moved up the criminal ladder. Rumors, sparked by a report in the British tabloid Daily Mail, swirled that Diablo was working with Albanian drug traffickers that were using the Durán as a staging area to traffic cocaine to Europe. The Latin Kings have also been loosely linked to the Lagartos, Tiguerones, and the Lobos, among others.

The reality, according to numerous current and former security forces and intelligence officials consulted by InSight Crime, is that Diablo and the Latin Kings are in survival mode. Each chapter, from Quito to Guayaquil, is adapting to its own context and circumstances, which could explain why the Latin Kings have been connected to so many larger criminal organizations.

This includes Durán, where the war between the Latin Kings and the Chone Killers has intensified. In 2023, the Chone Killers reportedly murdered one of Diablo’s relatives. The Latin Kings responded, reportedly killing a relative of a top Chone Killer. The same year, murders in the municipality skyrocketed to 456, an astounding 40-fold increase since the low point in 2017, when there were just 11 homicides in Durán. 

SEE ALSO: The Anatomy of Violence in Durán

Throughout, Diablo has maintained his illicit businesses, officials say, most notably that of peddling drugs on a local level. It remains lucrative. In the years after his release from prison, Diablo and some of his associates established a cacao-processing company, a small transport company, and a housekeeping service called The Magnificent of Cleaning.

As the fighting in Durán has worsened, so has the Latin Kings’ reputation. The government, following a horrific spate of violence across the country in January, declared the Latin Kings one of 22 “terrorist” organizations in Ecuador. It could be a blessing. A fierce reputation, and Diablo’s de facto leadership, may be the only thing keeping the organization from slipping into oblivion. 

“Diablito is bold, outgoing and is getting it,” the high-ranking Latin King said. “Brave. He crosses the line. He feeds us. When we can’t make it with the government, he’ll make it for us. And we don’t become no cartel. We remain Kings.”