Drug traffickers used the Ecuadorian president’s family banana export business to smuggle cocaine.
Balkan gangsters boasted in intercepted chats about how they had exclusive rights to use shipping containers from the Noboa Corp., owned by President Daniel Noboa, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s investigation; one message described a 950lb drug shipment.
The findings prove awkward for Noboa, who has called for the US to back his “war” against “narco-terrorists.”
Washington temporarily deployed troops to Ecuador last week, despite Ecuadorians recently voting against establishing foreign military bases.
Ecuadorians aren’t “swayed by the simplistic narrative that a permanent US military presence in their country would help end gang violence,” the country’s former foreign minister argued in Project Syndicate.