Trapped in the Tide of Organized Crime

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Marcos Ruiz is lying face down in the mud, legs splayed and one arm sunk up to his shoulder in a narrow hole. When he finally grabs the crab burrowing in the hole, he pushes himself out with his other arm and sits back on his heels to examine his prize. The red mangrove crab is male and looks to be the right size, longer than 7.5 centimeters, so he tucks it into his long sweater, which has been folded up and fastened with a cord to create a pouch squirming with live crabs. Then he sloshes over to the next hole and reaches in.

From behind a line of leggy, verdant mangrove trees, his friend and colleague Pablo Abelardo Yepes Villon eggs him on. “Your arms are too short, Marcos!” he yells. Ruiz laughs, trying to hold his face out of a puddle with one arm still in the hole.

This easy camaraderie is emblematic of life in Ecuador’s crabbing collectives—traditional communities of cangrejeros, or crabbers, who catch and sell crustaceans while protecting the mangrove ecosystems in which those crabs live. Though the practice dates back generations, only in the past 25 years have Ecuador’s 3,300 or so cangrejeros begun organizing into formal groups. Today, some 60 collectives dot the 2,200-kilometer-long coast. Their members begin each day in much the same way as their parents or grandparents did—leaving their homes before dawn, hitching rides to the port, and boating down rivers to the mangroves where they spend the morning traipsing through watery forests before exhaustion and heat force them back to dry land. In these early hours, the only sounds are the chatter of parrots and parakeets and the workers’ own voices.

Marcos Ruiz, 38, has been catching crabs in Ecuador’s mangroves since he was 19 years old. He now supports his family with his catch.

Lately, though, the tranquility of this routine has been shattered. Ruiz has been a cangrejero for more than 20 years, and in that time, he and his fellow crabbers have overcome pirates, unforgiving weather, and an aggressive shrimp farming industry. Now, organized crime and drug trafficking threaten to undo those gains. In addition to the day’s catch, Ruiz must also consider the armed group charging his collective a monthly extortion fee, the strain of safely getting to the mangroves and home again, and plummeting sales related to the violence that has largely taken over Ecuador’s coast. Can the cangrejeros’ unity and connection to place help them withstand such pressures?

Ruiz is one of nearly 100 members of the crabbing collective Nuevo Porvenir, which cares for more than 3,000 hectares of mangroves outside Naranjal, a small city in the coastal province of Guayas known for its crabbing culture. Driving into the city from the north, cars are greeted by a giant crab above the colorful, oversize letters that spell out Naranjal, while vibrant crab graffiti spatters the city walls. Locals host an annual crab festival, where they re-create the muddy mangrove environment in the streets, laying down plastic tarps and filling them with mud, mangrove branches, and crabs. Restaurants and food stalls serve crab spaghetti, crab in garlic sauce, crab fried rice, or crab corviche: mashed plantains formed into balls, filled with crab, and fried. Last year, the festival attracted nearly 70,000 visitors—an economic boost for the small city of 40,000.

Much of this is possible because of the work of Nuevo Porvenir. Because mangroves are considered part of Ecuador’s natural heritage, the land is technically owned by the federal government, but since 1999, the national Sustainable Use and Mangrove Custody Agreements have granted crabbing collectives like Nuevo Porvenir custody over their traditional lands. Under the agreements, each collective must create its own management plan, submit annual reports to the federal government, and report any signs of deforestation to the Ministry of Environment.

A giant crab welcomes visitors to the city of Naranjal, known for its crabbing culture and annual crab festival.

This is no small task. Mangroves used to line almost all of Ecuador’s coast, but shrimp companies have cut down over a quarter of them since the 1970s to make room for the saltwater pools they use to raise shrimp for commercial distribution around the world. In the two decades since the mangrove custody agreements went into effect, deforestation decreased from 2.35 percent to 0.15 percent per year, thanks to monitoring and reporting by cangrejero communities and better environmental regulations. Between 2006 and 2016, Ecuador’s mangroves actually increased by 14,864 hectares as crabbing communities, aided by local universities and government institutions, planted mangrove saplings in degraded areas. People value mangroves not just for the economic and food security they provide but also because of the natural barriers and defense against storm surges they create. And research increasingly shows that mangroves are also more effective at storing carbon than most other types of forests.

Still, these victories have come at a cost for cangrejeros, who have long reported intimidations and threats from Ecuador’s shrimp farming industry—one of the world’s largest shrimp exporters. Cangrejeros claim that shrimp companies have hired armed guards and trained dogs to swim out to sea and attack crabbers’ boats. Ruiz told me these conflicts have died down around Naranjal as the expansion of shrimping has slowed, but they continue elsewhere.

Soon after Ruiz and his colleagues overcame conflicts with the shrimping industry, though, organized crime began to rise. As recently as 2018, Ecuador was considered one of the safest countries in the Americas, but today it is among the three most violent. The vast majority of violence is concentrated along the coast, as armed groups battle to control the ports through which traffickers ship cocaine and other illegal drugs out of South America. Several of Ecuador’s coastal cities, like Esmeraldas and Guayaquil, have become some of the deadliest in Latin America.

Sandwiched between Colombia and Peru—the world’s largest producers of coca leaves for cocaine—Ecuador has long been a transit hub for drugs heading north. In 2021, coca cultivation spiked in response to a global surge in demand for recreational cocaine, and both local and international gangs began vying for control of Ecuador’s increasingly vital shipping routes. Around the same time, a series of corruption scandals and an economic crisis gripped the country, and the federal government slashed funding to the country’s prison and judicial systems, leaving Ecuador ill-prepared to take on gangs and cartels.

Naranjal, just 92 kilometers from the bustling port of Guayaquil, has been transformed by the violence; as of 2023 it had the fourth-highest homicide rate in the country. With armed groups battling for control of the city, Ruiz says the number of people being killed by sicarios, or contract killers, or otherwise harmed has cast a shadow over daily life. (He and others prefer not to name the groups, for their own safety.) The violence has also put pressure on fishing and crabbing collectives, which work every day along the same shores that armed groups are trying to control.

Map data by ArcGIS

In summer 2023, Ruiz and other leaders started receiving threatening phone calls from one gang, demanding a US $10 monthly fee from each member of Nuevo Porvenir. This doesn’t represent a massive portion of Ruiz’s monthly salary of roughly $960, but as he is the only breadwinner for his wife and three kids in a country where the average cost of living for a family of four is $800 a month, it’s an extra burden with few benefits, he says. Armed groups say that the extortion money is for the collective’s protection, but despite paying the monthly fees—known locally as the vacuna, or vaccine—Nuevo Porvenir nonetheless lost one of its members and his son, both of whom were killed by a local gang in late 2023.

The 19-year-old son had been recruited by the gang to sell drugs while in school. After learning he was going to become a father, the teenager tried to disassociate himself and the gang became angry, threatening his life. He eventually left school to avoid the threats and began crabbing with his father in the mangroves. One day, gang members followed him home and shot both the teen and his father, who tried to hold the group off at the door.

Another member of Nuevo Porvenir, who asked that I not use his name out of fear of repercussions, told me that similar events have become all too common. “Death and extortions are normal (now),” he says. “I am not saying that it is acceptable or right, just that it’s normal.”

Normal or not, the murders shocked the collective, says Ruiz, and were a wake-up call to keep better track of his own kids. It also convinced him to pay the vacuna. “Obviously if (we don’t) pay they are going to retaliate … it’s worrying, and obviously those of us who have families, we always think about (them),” he says.

After a long morning of working in the mangroves, a group of cangrejeros, or crabbers, wash the mud off their clothes—and their catch—in a nearby river.

Vacunas aren’t necessarily new, but the practice of imposing them has skyrocketed across the country in recent years in concert with the rise in criminal groups, says Renato Rivera, director of the nonprofit Ecuadorian Organized Crime Observatory, an initiative created by the Pan American Development Foundation. These extortions give criminal groups an extra source of income and allow them to increase control over an area by instilling fear in local populations, says Rivera.

In January 2024, Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, declared a state of “internal armed conflict” against 22 local and international criminal groups he says are operating in Ecuador, as well as a nationwide state of emergency that put military in the streets and forced citizens to abide by curfews. As a result, the nation’s armed forces announced they had arrested over 10,000 people in less than two months, many of whom were accused of terrorism. By March, homicides nationwide had reportedly decreased from 40 per day to 12, though extortions and kidnappings increased. And several areas along illegal drug routes have actually seen increases in violent deaths.

Amid the turmoil of crime and curfews, restaurant business has dropped, which has reduced demand for crabs. Ruiz says during the height of the violence last year, his collective’s sales fell by nearly 50 percent. Today, sales are still 20 percent lower than a few years ago. The collective has also halted an ecotourism project taking tourists into the mangroves and to the nearby Isla de los Pájaros (Island of the Birds) to see rare migrating species. It was a way to bring in extra income, but “people no longer want to come out of fear,” says Ruiz. They’re afraid “that somebody is going to rob or kidnap them.”

After a few days in the mangroves, I travel to Quito to meet with Katherine Herrera Aguilar, an independent political analyst specializing in public and state security in Ecuador. At a rooftop restaurant in the city’s historical center, overlooking the ceramic-tiled roofs and colorful walls of the colonial-era buildings below, a group of English-speaking tourists take selfies and photos of the view while Herrera Aguilar explains how armed groups have created a “parallel state” in peripheral neighborhoods and small communities like Naranjal. In Herrera Aguilar’s view, such places have long lacked adequate government investment in education, job creation, security, social programs, or even financial support for local crabbing and fishing communities. This has allowed armed groups to fill the void by providing lucrative opportunities in the drug trade and promising support and security for anyone who will join their ranks.

The government has responded to Ecuador’s security crisis thus far by sending police and military to the more violent centers like Guayaquil and Esmeraldas, says Herrera Aguilar. But it has failed to respond to the ways that organized crime is operating in nearby rural areas, where the violence is less visible to national and international observers. “Other (government and economic support) needs to be fed into these spaces so that these illegitimate actors do not gain territory,” she says.

Ruiz says that despite the federal government’s recent actions, he’s never seen extra police or military in Naranjal or surrounding communities. And state authorities haven’t been very helpful for the cangrejeros either. The Ministry of Environment no longer responds to complaints about illegal deforestation, he adds, or patrols the coasts for environmental crimes. And there have been delays in renewing the Sustainable Use and Mangrove Custody Agreements, which expire every 10 years, making the cangrejeros’ livelihood and access to the land feel increasingly precarious.

Crabbers tie their catch into bundles to sell to third-party buyers, who then sell the crabs to markets across Ecuador.

In an email, the Ministry of Environment says it received only one complaint about illegal deforestation in the mangroves this year, and it did respond, together with the national police, Ecuadorian Navy, and the Ministry of Production, Fisheries, and Aquaculture. The ministry also denies that it is behind on processing agreements with the crabbing communities, saying any delays are due to lack of documentation by the collectives. But for the members of Nuevo Porvenir, it feels like the gains they’ve made toward protecting and reforesting the mangroves are slipping farther and farther from reach.

As for the president’s war against organized crime, Herrera Aguilar says it’s more about politicizing security than actually implementing policies to improve security. Though there have been some improvements, the efforts have done nothing to address the underlying issues.

Back in the mangroves, the tension of the nearby city feels less overwhelming. Herons and ibises perch on the riverbanks, while beyond a wall of tangled roots, Ruiz’s friend and colleague Yepes Villon shouts with excitement when he finds an extra-large male crab. Ruiz bellows Spanish pop ballads—“Cavernícolas, eso fuimos, sin patria, sin futuro, sin hogar!”—as he splashes from hole to hole, swatting mosquitos from his face. They and the other cangrejeros are dripping with mud.

One of them, Steven Nahin Gomez Anchundia, joined the Nuevo Porvenir collective nearly five years ago after graduating from high school. Now, he kneels in the mud tying the crabs he has caught into neatly packed bundles of 12 to sell to buyers. Crabbing is still one of the most secure ways to make a living, Gomez Anchundia says; he became a crabber because there were no other jobs in the area. Plus, there’s no boss to hassle him, and “it’s more fun than being frustrated and just thinking all the time.”

Another member, Wilmer Joel Bustos Chilpe, joined the collective just a few weeks before my visit. At 20 years old, he’s been driving a taxi for the past year, but that’s become dangerous due to the increased gang presence and because taxi drivers can’t usually control who their clients are or where they drive. Now, he’s learning the ropes in the mangroves in the mornings, making enough money to allow him to stop picking up clients on the streets and to afford giving rides only to people he knows in the afternoons and evenings.

Nuevo Porvenir and three other crabbing collectives have also created a company called Mansur with the assistance of the anti-poverty NGO Heifer Ecuador. Through Mansur, the collectives can sell their crab products directly to restaurants and stores and export to Miami, rather than going through a third-party buyer. The company also provides crabbing families with extra income, since the wives of the crabbers work in the packaging plant, shelling, processing, and packaging the crabmeat.

Some of the wives of the cangrejeros in an Ecuadorian crabbing collective called Nuevo Porvenir work in a factory shelling crabs. Thanks to their collective organizing, they sell the meat directly to buyers.

Rosa Rodríguez, senior country director of Heifer Ecuador, says the collectives’ experience of working together, meeting for monthly meetings, monitoring their custodial lands, and making coordinated business decisions has made it easier to continue operating in an increasingly dangerous and complicated region. Their strength comes from their unity, says Rodríguez—their “solid organization that allows them to talk, make decisions, and face issues more collectively.”

Ruiz started crabbing as a way to make money to support his family, but decades later, he has learned to appreciate the mangrove ecosystem, and the tranquility and autonomy of working in the forest. “We always say that it’s a job where nobody rushes you,” he says. “We have also acquired a love for nature. We saw that it was important, we got to know the mangrove, the importance of the mangrove, from the ecological to the economic point of view.”

Despite their connection to this place, the cangrejeros in Nuevo Porvenir have dropped in number from 130 to 100 in the past two years, says Ruiz, as members left Ecuador to escape the instability. Most went to the United States, choosing the grueling and dangerous walk north over the economic and security crisis at home. In other areas of the country, crabbing collectives have abandoned their mangroves altogether.

Ruiz says that if the situation doesn’t improve, he is also considering leaving. And without people like him protecting the mangroves and continuing the traditions that connect the people, land, and waters of Ecuador’s coast, organized crime threatens to upend not only individual lives but an entire culture.