Noboa Grapples With Another High-Profile Prison Break in Ecuador

(Bloomberg) -- Ecuador’s government offered a $1 million reward on Monday for information leading to the recapture of suspected drug lord Rolando Federico Gomez after he escaped from a Guayaquil penitentiary disguised in a military uniform to pass checkpoints unhindered.

President Daniel Noboa designated the man colloquially known as Fede a military target after his breakout Friday. His escape “wasn’t negligence, it was complicity,” the president said Saturday in a post on X, adding that toughened recent legislation will be applied to the fugitive. The Prosecutor General’s Office detained 19 soldiers, two prison guards and an inmate amid its initial investigation.

Fede, who faced charges of murder, drug trafficking and weapons smuggling as the alleged leader of the Las Aguilas gang, was one of the highest-profile detainees in Noboa’s internal war on drug trafficking organizations.

Ecuador is coming off its most violent first quarter on record. Murders are now topping 13 per 100,000 inhabitants, while they held below 10 last year and in 2023 even as crime surged. Noboa launched the internal conflict after the January 2024 escape of convicted drug trafficker Adolfo Macias, alias Fito, who remains at large. 

Fede was first arrested during a party at a rural estate west of Guayaquil in May 2024 and controversially released by a judge who ruled he wasn’t a flight risk. He was re-arrested on Jan. 30 in Daule, also near Guayaquil, the hub of violent crime as drug traffickers target shipping containers in its port facilities to export cocaine.

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