Resting on a crest of highland overlooking Ecuador’s Pacific coast, Los Bajos is a squalid collection of rough brick homes interspersed with the occasional slot casino. A jungle-clad hill looms over the town; vultures wheel above the unlit dirt road that weaves down to it through scrubland exuding a sour stench, like that of too-fresh fertiliser. Signs warn that anyone caught dumping rubbish along the road will be subject to a $900 fine, though for the residents of Los Bajos it’s hardly the litter that’s been the problem of late. It’s the corpses.

Mercedes Morales, a 45-year-old schoolteacher and community leader, has heard the locals’ complaints. The first body, discovered two years ago, was that of a local taxi driver. Morales estimated that 20 bodies have been found along the road into Los Bajos in the past six months alone. “No, no, more bodies than that,” interjected her husband, sitting next to her on a white plastic lawn chair in their bare cement courtyard. “Too many to count.”

The pair agreed that the bodies tend to be found in the morning, by residents commuting to a nearby fish-processing factory. “They call up the police, then drive away quickly,” Morales explained. Some victims are Venezuelan migrant workers. But most are Ecuadorians, young men whom relatives can recognise at the morgue “because of their tattoos”. Often the men are long dead by the time they reach Los Bajos, having been transported in stolen vehicles that are later torched in the hills beyond town. But now and then they get murdered onsite. “We hear the gunshots in the evening,” Morales told me. Over the past year Los Bajos’s several hundred residents have adopted an unofficial curfew; they do not leave their homes after sundown or walk beyond the town alone.

Los Bajos and the surrounding area were once the world’s foremost producer of hand-woven straw hats, which were widely misnamed Panamas after Theodore Roosevelt was photographed wearing one while touring the construction site of the Panama Canal in 1906. By the 1980s the industry was in decline due to the rise of cheap imitations. Los Bajos’s struggling residents had reason to hope for a more prosperous future when, in 2007, Ecuador’s government announced the construction of a colossal oil and petrochemical refinery in the nearby hills. The facility – the largest infrastructure project in Ecuador’s history, designed to import 300,000 barrels of Venezuelan oil each day, refine it, then export it across South America – promised to bring 25,000 jobs to the region.

They never materialised. In 2019, after years of delays, construction on the refinery ceased. But in the past five years the half-built facility – now a vacant expanse of tarmac larger than Gibraltar – has attracted another import-export business. Approximately once every two weeks Morales hears the buzz of small planes, taking off from and landing in the refinery site at night.

It’s no secret what they are doing: transporting cocaine out of Ecuador and suitcases of cash into it. And no one – officially, at any rate – is paying attention. In November 2021 a nearby radar installation was mysteriously blown up and never replaced. As a vicious war between drug gangs broke out over the increasing numbers of cocaine shipments, rotting corpses began to pile up on the outskirts of Los Bajos. “It never used to be like this,” Morales told me, her voice cracking with exasperation. “But we’ve now become so used to it all.”

Over the past ten years, cocaine has transformed Ecuador from one of South America’s most stable nations – with safer streets and higher living standards than many of its neighbours – into the most dangerous country on the continent. More than 8,000 murders were recorded last year. Victims are wide-ranging: ten volleyball players, nine shrimp fishermen, six mayors, five tourists, two state prosecutors, a presidential candidate and the leader of a political party are among those shot or assassinated since 2023. The industrial city of Durán – where much of the governing apparatus has been hijacked by mobsters – has a good claim to being the murder capital of the world; on average, someone is killed there every 19 hours.

In January this year, brutal prison riots erupted across Ecuador. Locked-up gangsters made a mockery of the state’s attempt to control them, hustling their leaders in and out of jails at will while holding hundreds of guards hostage. Within days, the country’s 36-year-old president, Daniel Noboa – the scion of a banana empire who had been elected three months earlier – declared a state of emergency and deployed his army to the streets. “Be brave,” he challenged the gangs. “Fight the soldiers.”

The success of Noboa’s approach remains to be seen. What is clear is that gang upheaval has, in less than a decade, disfigured great segments of Ecuadorian society, turning a country that has failed to properly confront its crime epidemic into one that may never recover from it. Since 2015, nearly a third of the 3,000-odd fishermen who once headed out from the quaint seaside community of Jaramijó every month to catch dorado in the Pacific have vanished; forced into moving packages on behalf of gangs, many tend to surface months after their disappearance in foreign prisons thousands of miles away on narco-trafficking charges. In El Oro, a region which grows one-tenth of the world’s bananas, the infrastructure used to transport the planet’s most consumed fruit has been retrofitted into a colossal smuggling front, turning Ecuador’s signature export into an international byword for contraband. In the coastal city of Manta, a torrent of money-laundering has led to a ban on bank deposits exceeding $5,000, I was told by Paco Delgado Intriago, a district prosecutor. Priests in towns such as Mocache have been commissioned to bury gangsters with armouries of machineguns to provide protection in the afterlife. In Cooperativa San Francisco – a poor section of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s main port – gangsters have cut the tongues out of children to prevent them from becoming police informants.

And then there’s the story I heard from a recent prison inmate, who now drives a popular children’s train around Guayaquil known as the gusanito, the “little worm”. For four days the man watched as, in the cell across the hall from his own, a gangster’s limbs were smashed by his rivals with an industrial hammer, his bones sliced with an axe and disposed of down a rubbish chute. All the while prison guards looked on, unperturbed.

It’s an astonishing – and abrupt – about-face. For decades, Ecuador, sandwiched between the coca fields of Colombia and Peru, operated at the margins of the narcotics industry. Occasionally it acted as a departure point to northern markets, but the coca leaf was not typically grown there, nor was the country a great centre for cocaine manufacture.

Two developments in 2016 shifted Ecuador’s fortunes. The first was a power vacuum generated by the partial dismantling of the Mexico-based Sinaloa Cartel; its leader, Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, was extradited that year to the United States. For two decades Sinaloa had lorded over smuggling routes into North America. But El Chapo’s extradition destabilised the cartel, creating opportunities for distant mafias – Italians, Serbs, Russians – to move from simply managing drug distribution in their own regions to controlling exports out of South America themselves.

That same year, a peace agreement was reached between the Colombian government and FARC, the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla army that had long funded itself through control of coca-growing and trafficking. The official end of hostilities didn’t so much stop coca-harvesting in Colombia – last year production hit a two-decade high – as push it to the country’s fringes; by 2022, satellite images revealed that half of Colombia’s coca plants had relocated south to regions bordering Ecuador, half of them within ten miles of the border.

Few places could have been more appealing to a global cartel system in disarray. Here was a country with dozens of ports connected by serviceable roads. Six hundred miles west, the Galápagos Islands offer an ideal refuelling and distribution station for contraband-laden vessels. A bustling tourism industry and a dollarised economy present opportunities for laundering illicit earnings. And Ecuador has long been plugged into global shipping networks, with the infrastructure to support the export of 4m tonnes of bananas a year to practically every country in the world.

Almost in unison, criminal organisations from Mexico to Montenegro began homing in on Ecuador’s Pacific coast and brokering connections with more than 20 local gangs, which had historically battled for control of city blocks and puny fishing villages. Now a far more attractive prize was at hand: the chance to become the leading local partner in the $100bn-a-year international cocaine trade. The gangs began turfing one another out of ports and plantations. Some inherited Sinaloa’s connections; others joined a rival alliance, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, to drive out Sinaloa’s remaining vassals and kill or convert its members. In 2021 nearly 3,000 people were murdered, and the state imprisoned hundreds of gangsters. It made little difference. Ecuador’s murder rate doubled in 2022, then doubled again in 2023.

I headed south from Los Bajos. From the smoggy sprawl of suburbs beyond Guayaquil emerged La Penitenciaría del Litoral, a hulking grey complex encircled by blue fencing. One of Ecuador’s largest prisons, it made international headlines in 2019, when inmates began livestreaming massacres of rival gangsters from within its walls. In one incident, more than a hundred were killed; in another, a football game was played with a severed head.

Outside the building, I watched as family members queued to bring food to those inside, clutching plastic bags bulging with milk bottles and biscuits. Nearby, beneath red and yellow umbrellas, foldout tables were stacked with canisters of protein powder. A saleswoman told me the product is in high demand inside Litoral, where it is important to be strong enough to defend yourself.

Everything has a price within the prison, where the guards – who work in close co-operation with the Ecuadorian army – routinely extort cash from the prisoners. A rotisserie chicken? $50. A plate of rice? $40. A phone conversation? Five dollars for the first minute, ten for every additional minute. The guards arrange these services and bill the prisoner’s family. At the end of the month, it’s not unusual for families to learn that they owe hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to the penitentiary. If the bill goes unpaid, their imprisoned relatives are beaten, or killed.

One way to avoid these fates is to buy protection. At a mall food court I met a man who had spent ten years inside Litoral, three of them informally running one of its wings on behalf of Los Choneros, a gang named after a town in western Ecuador; he became known for organising sinister group punishments of child rapists. Known as “Fat Guy” for his heavyset frame, he arrived at the mall with his two young children. As the elder child bounced upon his knee, Fat Guy told me that inmates paid $50 per month, smuggled into prison by their relatives during visiting hours, to be protected from most violence. A cut of this money is kicked up to guards and the army – who, from the inmates’ perspective, make no great secret of the fact that Ecuador’s swelling prison population is good for business.

There is another way to survive life inside. “Those who can’t pay [for protection] – the poor – are the ones who join the gangs,” Fat Guy explained, breaking up chunks of banana bread and feeding them to his children. What resulted was the grotesque irony of the violence now upending Ecuador: the gangs proliferate through the very prison system that is supposed to be crushing them. Today, Ecuador’s gangs can count nearly a third of the country’s 33,000 inmates among their members.

Around 2017 life in Litoral started to change, claimed Fat Guy. As the cocaine trade gripped the country, the prison’s population grew to several thousand in a jail designed to hold only hundreds. Gangsters started to see the penitentiary as a refuge. Murders, drug shipments, criminal alliances – all these could be more safely organised from within the cells than in the streets, where turf wars over ever-more-lucrative smuggling routes raged. “Now you had gangsters who wanted to be inside prison!” Fat Guy told me. Rich prisoners could bribe guards to get smuggled to and from Litoral inside fuel trucks, which simultaneously hustled in everything from whiskey to grenades. “Everywhere you looked, more opportunities were emerging,” Fat Guy said. “More freedom and more money.”

Ecuador’s gangsters, who now number in the tens of thousands, may have earned astronomical fortunes from cocaine – but they still conduct themselves like street thugs. In contrast with the corporate efficiency of the international cartels they aspire to become, Ecuadorian gangs remain broad, informal operations that strike opportunistic partnerships with one another. Membership is fluid. The only real mark of loyalty is the tattoo. (A crown for the Latin Kings; a tiger for Los Tiguerones.) Even as they have successfully elbowed their way into the world of globalised narcotics, Ecuador’s gangsters continue to enrich themselves indiscriminately, pulling the logistical strings behind billion-dollar cocaine shipments and pickpocketing mobile phones from American tourists with equal fervour.

This makes Ecuador unusually dangerous. In places such as southern Italy, mafias typically do not tolerate lesser forms of street crime. But in Ecuador the gangs deliberately cultivate chaos as the quickest path to wealth and attention. They operate TikTok accounts that feature sidewalk shoot-outs and YouTube channels with music videos starring heavies adorned in Armani watches and Versace sunglasses. To intimidate rivals, and to impress international partners, they stage acts of rowdy public violence: amid January’s mayhem, a band of thugs broke their way into a television station in Guayaquil during the filming of the evening news, tossing journalists to the ground on live TV and waving assault rifles before the cameras. “It is very disorganised. A handful of gangs have connections to international mafias. But the rest are not sure what they are doing or of their position in global markets,” Renato Rivera, the director of the Ecuadorian Observatory on Organised Crime, told me. “That’s why we see the degree of violence that we do: these organisations are attempting to gain legitimacy in the eyes of their global superiors.”

The Guayaquil neighbourhood of Nueva Prosperina has a claim to being the world’s deadliest municipality per head. A few days before I arrived, analysis of shell casings collected from 27 recent crime scenes across the neighbourhood revealed that a single 9mm pistol had been used in 34 murders this year alone.

On a Friday morning I entered Nueva Prosperina’s police station, a grungy building where dozing stray dogs formed an obstacle course in the hallways. Roberto Santamaría León, the police chief, was being interviewed by a local TV station about the latest crisis. The gangs were paying children $20 to smash surveillance cameras with fishing poles; more than 20 had been broken that week alone. It was already difficult enough to prosecute gangsters, Santamaría explained to the reporters. Without footage of their crimes, it would become all but impossible.

Over the past few months Santamaría, a muscular man in neatly pressed olive-green uniform, had been attempting not just to fight the crime pandemic, but reconstruct how it spread in the first place. His strategy involved plucking hundreds of gangsters off the streets – mostly teenagers on charges of petty drug-trafficking – to pry out details of how they earn their money. “This precinct is earning the gangs $180,000 a month,” Santamaría explained. “They’ve built a parallel state here. Just as you or I pay taxes to our countries, so here residents pay taxes to the gangs.” Many civilians are forced to do so through an extortion system known as the vacuna (vaccine), named for the dose of corruption it injects into every limb of Ecuadorian society. Vacunas can be demanded at monthly, weekly, or even daily intervals, from virtually anyone – taxi drivers, shop owners, citrus farmers. Regardless of the victim or the sum involved, the goal is much the same: to quash any doubt that the gangs’ authority eclipses that of the state.

According to Santamaría, the gangs in Nueva Prosperina favour recruiting children, who cannot be prosecuted as adults. “They recruit a 12-year-old. They give him a house, a gun and $200 a month to store drugs for them,” he said. The boys are paid another $200 to move drugs from one end of the neighbourhood to another, or to murder a rival gang member; they’re paid $100 if they successfully recruit a peer. Santamaría has found that children were earning as much as $4,000 a month to oversee gang operations in Nueva Prosperina. After a while, the organisation begins to pay them in drugs instead of cash. The local economy devolves into a narco-barter system, in which even civilians find themselves using bagged cocaine as currency to buy basic goods. Through the simple act of controlling the neighbourhood, cash is drained into the hands of the gangs. “The territory itself becomes the business,” Santamaría told me.

Other police districts focus on curbing organised crime by prosecuting the perpetrators. Santamaría hews to a different strategy: what he considers “rooting out the problem at its source”. The tactic, he told me in hushed voice, is to confiscate the gangsters’ motorcycles. Without them, the groups are unable to move cash and drugs with such robotic speed. Can’t they just buy new motorcycles? I asked. They can, Santamaría conceded. “But we’ve bought ourselves time. And that’s what we need right now.”

On a weekend in late June, 15 people were murdered in and around Guayaquil. Deaths had been delivered by machinegun, pistol and a pair of gangsters dressed as police officers. The following Tuesday, I woke up to news of more bloodshed. A video was circulating on WhatsApp. “We have two more dead people,” a voice is heard saying as shots echo down a dark street. “My Lord!” That morning, at around 7.30am, the home of a state prosecutor had been targeted by two teenagers riding a motorcycle. They pumped several rounds into a policeman before zooming away; the officer survived. Later that day, on the north side of the city, a 35-year-old man was shot by a sicario outside a church; on its south side, a stack of explosives was discovered in the back of a chicken restaurant – probably a so-called “taco bomb”, compact and transportable, deployed in retaliation for failure to pay that month’s vacuna. All the while, on newsstands across Guayaquil, the front page of the daily Extra reported the mysterious death of a beauty queen in a car crash, with insinuations that the wreck had been staged. If true, it would mark the fifth murder of a model in the past three years in Ecuador, where even beauty pageants have become infested with organised crime: gangsters sponsor winners, finance their careers, and – when necessary – assassinate those who answer to their rivals.

I headed to Guayaquil’s morgue, a building on the edge of a roaring motorway beyond the city. Along the pavement, families gathered in dreary clusters, waiting to claim their dead. Among them was a woman with frizzy blonde hair and oversized glasses, wearing a business card around her neck that read Funeraria Los Jardines Del Edén. She told me her name was Yuribis Yolimar and that she had emigrated from Venezuela eight years ago. She worked as a cook and in a nail salon before setting up a funeral parlour in 2021. “There are now eight to ten deaths a day,” Yolimar said, adding that most are murders. I asked her if the gang war had been good for business. She paused. “Not really. In November I was kidnapped.” She declined to elaborate.

A few days later I arranged to meet a woman called Margarita Pardo in a park in Martha de Roldós, a dingy neighbourhood of Guayaquil. She arrived dressed in black, with sunglasses she did not take off for the next two hours. We sat in the corner of a playground as she told me, with remarkable composure, an excruciating story.

Two months earlier, Pardo’s 19-year-old son Jesús went on an afternoon walk with his girlfriend Daniela. By nightfall they hadn’t returned. The next morning, Pardo and Jesús’s four siblings stuck posters around the neighbourhood and appealed to friends for information. They called hospitals and morgues, even as they refused to believe something bad had happened to the couple: the pair had nothing to do with the criminality roiling Guayaquil. “We thought they might still be alive,” Pardo told me.

On a Sunday Pardo received a call from the police asking her to report to the station and provide a description of Jesús. There, she described for the officers his “curly hair and the scars on his face”, that he had no tattoos, that he had been “wearing camouflage trousers and a black shirt”. The next day, the police informed Pardo that two bodies had been found. One was Daniela. The other was too difficult to identify “because it [was] too bloated to make out the scars on the face”. No cause of death was given; no autopsy had been attempted.

An off-duty officer eventually sent Pardo a photo of the bodies, which were discovered face down in what resembled a swamp. Three days later, she was sent another photo – of a male body, showing signs of decomposition, on a mortuary table – and asked to confirm the identity. “The lips were falling off his face,” Pardo told me, but she had no doubt it was Jesús.

Over the next few months Pardo tried in vain to claim her son’s body from Guayaquil’s morgue. On a morning in late May, Pardo saw a report on the news that a refrigerator at the morgue had stopped working. Attempts to refreeze scores of liquifying corpses had been unsuccessful; they had congealed together, making it all but impossible to identify the bodies.

Pardo returned to the morgue that afternoon, outraged. “I just wanted the body. And they told me, ‘You can’t have it. There are toxic gases. And you don’t want it anyway. The bodies have been spoiled. The container has been broken for more than 15 days now.’”

For weeks Pardo continued to be rebuffed. Finally, on June 13th, six weeks after she last saw her son alive, she was granted permission to enter the container. Inside, everywhere, were “worms, black water and bodies on the floor”. She was handed a white plastic body bag that, she was told, contained what remained of her son. She unzipped it to be certain. “Worms were coming out of his face. The flesh was rotten. And I could see down to his bones. I began sobbing right away.”

By the end of our conversation Pardo could hardly speak, but she asked me to write down what made Jesús special. He loved exploring nature, she told me. He was working as a bricklayer to support his family but his dream was to be a soldier. And he loved dancing salsa. His favourite music, Pardo said, was reggaeton. “I don’t want anyone else to have to go through what I went through,” she told me as I left the park. Undoubtedly, though, many have: Jesús’s body was one of at least 200 that rotted this spring in the morgue’s broken freezer.

For all the chaos, Guayaquil remains a more-or-less functioning place. Bankers, shipping agents and civil servants head out to work each morning in their cars, pass their evenings at riverfront cafés and bars, and send their children to school – albeit ones encircled by walls topped with barbed wire. But the city of Durán, which rests along the swampy eastern bank of the Guayas river directly opposite the shiny towers of Guayaquil, is something else: a mob fiefdom, where the gangs have their hand in everything from tax collection to everyday access to running water. Three-quarters of Ecuador’s exports pass through Durán, which was once a merchants’ boom town. From the river, a mantle of slum rises above a drab stretch of factories and warehouses, some of which have shifted from housing vegetables and timber to bricks of cocaine.

Durán is not a place one should casually enter. One evening just after dusk, I joined a police battalion conducting a patrol of the city. Six pickup trucks weaved through the darkening urban sprawl. After 15 minutes, at a cross-section of boulevards, 18 officers, wearing balaclavas and carrying assault rifles, got out of the trucks and set up a perimeter of traffic cones. Over the next half-hour they flagged down incoming cars and shone torches into them. The operation had the air of a performance – a choreography of force to let the citizens of Durán know that the police hadn’t entirely abandoned them to the underworld.

While the cars were being checked, a lieutenant named Andrea Villacis told me that Durán’s neighbourhoods were divided into small sections, each of which was surveyed by a civilian – a street vendor, say, or a homeless person – in hock to the gangs. “They relay details of our patrols and incoming raids using walkie-talkies,” Villacis explained, nodding towards a group selling empanadas and juices. “They may be talking about us right now.”

The gangs also source information from within the police itself. Moles identify the “poorer members of the force”; tip-offs are exchanged for cash. A month and a half earlier, at an impromptu checkpoint outside Guayaquil, Villacis was stunned to find a captain of her unit in the backseat of a vehicle “packed with drugs and gang members”. “I had never suspected a thing,” she told me.

On a Friday afternoon I entered a vast cement building on the outskirts of Durán and was led to a freezing room guarded by four men clad in black armour. After a few moments Luis Chonillo – who runs his city from a series of secret safehouses – entered the room, dressed in a baseball cap and cargo pants, sipping black coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. “I’m the nomad mayor,” Chonillo told me, by way of introduction.

When he took office last May, Chonillo inherited an administration rife with criminal connections. Gangsters profited off nearly every aspect of Durán’s governance, infiltrating the construction, utilities and waste management firms contracted by the city authorities. Chonillo has attempted to clip these ties by scrutinising the firms’ finances. “It was soon possible to identify what you might call a pattern,” he told me. “Take the example of our water supply. I looked into the contract and began warning the media that it had problems. Four days later my family’s paper business was attacked by a bomb and I received a letter from one of the gangs: ‘We are going to take you out.’”

Three Ecuadorian mayors have been killed this year; 30 other local officials have been the targets of assassination attempts. But Chonillo’s murder would be the ultimate prize for the gangsters. A recent investigation by Ecuador’s attorney general found that dozens of state officials have basement ties to the gangs: some offer protection from the law, others help launder drug money. Perhaps more than anyone else in the country, Chonillo has put himself forward as the knight errant against this narco-political arrangement. “Criminal power cannot exist without the help of political power,” he told me. For good reason is he protected by bodyguards armed to the teeth, his nightly residence undisclosed and his daily schedule assiduously scrambled and re-scrambled. At least three attempts have been made on his life since he became mayor, one of which left two bodyguards and a bystander dead.

I asked Chonillo how long he thought the situation would continue. He paused. “It’s difficult to say. In Colombia the state has been waging the war on narco-organisations for 50 years now. And there’s still a lot of work there to be done. In Mexico the fight has been going on for 15-20 years. And it’s still not over.”

Today, one in three bananas consumed anywhere on Earth is grown in Ecuador. It would be hard to conjure a more ideal vehicle for smuggling drugs. Because bananas expire quickly, they tend to get hustled through customs. And because the Ecuadorian government has balked at investing in port scanners, the chance of customs agents detecting a suitcase-sized batch of cocaine welded into the floor of a 30-square-metre refrigerated steel box – thousands of which pass through the quays of Guayaquil or Durán on any given day – is thin.

Over the past five years, inspectors in one port of the world after another have pried open containers of Ecuadorian bananas, only to chance upon stashes of cocaine. In August 2023 9.5 tonnes, worth an estimated $800m, were discovered in a shipment to Spain, one month after 8 tonnes had been detected in a shipment that had reached the Netherlands. This year alone, huge hauls have been uncovered in Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Lebanon and once again in Spain. In the Adriatic nations of Albania, Croatia and Montenegro – whose narco-clans have begun dispatching foot-soldiers of their own to Guayaquil – banana imports from Ecuador have surged since 2017, even as the total volume of imports has decreased over that same period.

Franklin Torres was elected president of the National Federation of Banana Producers of Ecuador five years ago. “No one else wanted the job,” he told me at his farmhouse, which sits 80 miles north of Guayaquil, in the agricultural town of Ventanas. The journey featured looming aisles of banana trees on either side of the car for the better part of three hours, and required my driver to accelerate well over 100mph along certain stretches out of fear of kidnappers.

Torres’s position is unenviable: he is the public face of an industry that, within Ecuador, is under constant assault by the gangs and, outside Ecuador, is suspected of being a front for the cocaine trade. There are 6,000 banana plantation owners in the country. They are, if not exactly aristocratic, at least well-to-do: Torres, whose farm has approximately 80,000 trees, oversees the export of 8,000 boxes of bananas a week, bringing in several million dollars a year. Working for bosses like him are tens of thousands of pickers, many of them indigenous or mestizo, who get bussed back and forth between plantations for a pittance – two, perhaps three dollars a day.

Over the past decade Ecuador’s gangs have disrupted the almost feudal relationship between boss and picker. Some plantation owners willingly overlook the smuggling of cocaine inside their banana shipments in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. Others have to pay protection money: Torres told me the monthly vacuna runs from $2,000 to $4,000, though declined to say whether he himself pays it.

As we toured his farm, Torres pointed out a constellation of surveillance cameras as proof that he has no involvement in the cocaine business. “All our shipments are filmed as they get loaded,” he said, swinging his index finger from one camera to another. When cocaine does get smuggled into banana shipments, he said, it tends to happen on the narrow road to Guayaquil. A truck will have a “flat tyre” and enter a warehouse, where a consignment of cocaine will swiftly get welded into the container. Occasionally half-frozen handymen in the pay of the gangs are found inside refrigerated units that have been returned to farms, Torres told me.

Pickers also play a role, with some feeding information to gangsters about truck movements and export schedules. Abetting the gangs boosts the pickers’ wages, but it also puts them at the mercy of the cartels. Some simply get unlucky: at the plantation next to Torres’s, five workers were decapitated last year when a vacuna went unpaid by its owner.

A week after meeting Torres I headed south to El Oro, the most fertile of Ecuador’s lowlands, so named for the gold that Spanish explorers found in its hills – and a place where gang executions have become the order of the day. On plantation after plantation in the region the corpses of labourers have been accumulating: more than 30 had been found in the six months before my visit, with 15 discovered in June alone. From Guayaquil, a ribbon of road coils south, a stunning drive along an emerald coast swathed in thick tropical mist.

News had come in that morning of another massacre. A little after 5am, a contingent of banana pickers had entered the Hacienda La Alcira, a plantation in the dusty community of Santa Rosa, to turn on the irrigation pumps. They were confronted with the bodies of three men lying face-down on the ground among the banana trees, bullets in their skulls, their wrists bound by green rope.

A local who heard the gunshots had called the police. By the time I reached Santa Rosa, a little after 7am, a cluster of officers had convened a few dozen metres from the bodies, chatting and jotting things down in their notebooks. Stray dogs, drawn by the sight and smell of corpses, began to gravitate to the crime scene, while workers were trickling in for their shifts.

A man in a Yankees cap pulled up on a sputtering moped, a weed trimmer slung across his knees. His face was blank as he hopped off the bike and introduced himself as Milton Sosa. It was his third decade working at La Alcira, where he cuts vegetation and bags bananas to “keep them fresh for the foreigners”. I asked him if he was surprised by what had happened. He shook his head, explaining that three years earlier two bodies were found in the same spot. “There are too many cases now to remember,” Sosa told me. “The body they found last week” – he pointed to a distant corner of the plantation – “was a boy.”

Shortly after 8am a refrigerated mortuary truck arrived, its fat wheels squelching through the mud. Men carrying steel stretchers disappeared into the thicket of banana trees before reappearing several minutes later bearing the bodies, the tips of their sneakers protruding from beneath black tarpaulin.

After the police had left, an irresistible undertow of curiosity dragged a dozen-or-so locals to the crime scene. The lassoes of rope that had cuffed the men’s wrists had been tossed aside; a pool of blood, sickly neon against the damp brown earth, had begun to curdle. “The war has come here,” Giovanni Peralta, a local shopowner, said aloud to no one in particular as he circled mud speckled with brain matter.

By morning’s end, the man who reported the bodies had changed his story. He saw nothing, he insisted to a small gathering of local journalists, before briskly setting off for his house.

As the body count rises, Ecuadorians are left wondering whether they are condemned to a generation of violence. Even as many experts have warned against a militarised response to the gang problem, over the past year Ecuador’s president has vowed to annihilate his country’s narco-traffickers by force. In January, as part of his nationwide state of emergency, Noboa imposed an 11pm curfew and classified 22 gangs as “terrorist organisations”; his government later began arming soldiers with weapons seized from the gangsters. His approach is modelled on that of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who has presided over a jail-first, ask-questions-later campaign against the gangs, which has included the construction of a supermax prison capable of locking up 40,000 inmates. Two years on, Bukele’s strategy has perhaps become better known for its brutality rather than its success; roughly 8% of El Salvador’s young male population has been arrested. Whether Noboa can effectively imitate Bukele’s efforts remains unclear. Doing so would require disregarding Ecuador’s constitution, while the business model of Ecuadorian gangs – which, given their involvement in the drug trade, is not primarily reliant on extortion, as is the case in Central America – points to a more formidable challenge than the one that exists in El Salvador: a criminal system with impossibly deep pockets and no shortage of international connections.

In late June I travelled west from Guayaquil to Juntas del Pacífico, in the coastal region of Santa Elena, to watch as Noboa announced the construction of a maximum-security prison of his own. The unprepossessing village, no more than a few dozen houses lining a dirt lane filled with pigs and poultry, was in a state of breathless commotion. At its outskirts, a school playground had been cordoned off by rope. A white marquee had been set up; squadrons of Ecuadorian soldiers flanked it in parade formation, while others bearing machineguns and sniper rifles could be spotted on the nearby hills. Beneath the tent, sitting on hundreds of chairs arrayed in tidy rows, were the residents of Juntas del Pacífico in their Sunday best, gazing up at a simulated tour of a prison complex playing on a billboard-sized TV screen.

At half past eight in the morning, a camouflaged helicopter whirled in from the east, landing in the middle of a scrubby field. Out of it strutted Noboa, dressed in all black, a gold ring twinkling on the pinky of his right hand. He made for a small yellow tent, where a model of the future maximum-security Santa Elena prison had been built out of plywood. A local official, speaking into a microphone, explained to the president that the prison would be constructed by the China Road and Bridge Corporation. Israeli experts would train the staff and advanced facial-recognition technology would help keep tabs on 800 prisoners – ruthless gangsters who would be culled from overcrowded prisons across Ecuador. Four fences of electrified barbed wire would enclose the site.

Noboa then stepped up to the podium. “Seven months ago, our prison system was kidnapped and embarrassed by criminal organisations that have turned our jails into centres of operations,” he said. The new prison would put an end to Ecuador’s national shame. Within ten months the jail would be completed, Noboa assured the crowd. Juntas del Pacífico would become a meeting point, he quipped, drawing nervous chuckles from the townspeople – a meeting point for all the most dangerous men in Ecuador!

As Noboa spoke, shouting arose from a nearby hillside. He smirked as the voices grew louder. The protesters bore signs painted on ragged bedsheets. “No cárcel!” they chanted. “No jail!” As police marched forth to silence them, Noboa concluded his speech. Behind him, a pair of excavators were fired up. Their operators began swinging the machines’ necks to and fro, then plunged the shovels into the soil as dance music blasted from loudspeakers and exhaust fumes wafted across the stage.

After Noboa’s helicopter left, I tracked down one of the protesters. Like many residents of Juntas del Pacífico, Carola Cabrera Villón, a 59-year-old social worker, had indigenous roots. Her resistance to the prison’s construction stemmed not just from her belief that it would do nothing to solve Ecuador’s problems – Villón had spent three years volunteering in prisons in Guayaquil, which she insisted were “inhumane” – but that the project was itself “colonial” in aim. Noboa was outsourcing to a heavily indigenous corner of Ecuador the task of containing the criminality that had devastated much of the rest of the country. “All those problems you see in Guayaquil – they will come here!” Villón told me. “It’s something out of my nightmares.” Then there was the environmental impact. The Santa Elena prison would be built miles away from Juntas del Pacífico, on a parcel of primeval jungle owned by Villón’s family. Noboa’s government, she claimed, had appropriated the land without their consent. “They refused to answer any of our questions about what was happening,” Villón told me.

That afternoon I drove to the jail’s proposed location with Villón and several other activists, jouncing down a narrow unpaved road into pristine rainforest that squawked with all manner of exotic birds. After half an hour we reached the site, where it was clear that any attempt to complete the supermax prison on schedule – at the height of Noboa’s presidential re-election campaign next spring – would require inconceivable effort and manpower. Acres of jungle would need to be flattened, a road paved, electricity connected, tens of thousands of tonnes of concrete and rebar trucked in. I watched as Villón and several others did what little they could to signal their fury at the government’s plan, scrawling “No Jail!” onto a few tree stumps in blue spray paint.

After an hour the activists and I got back into the car to drive to Guayaquil, two hours to the east. As evening descended and our car neared the port, my driver turned to me. “While President Noboa was giving his speech, gang members were wandering all around Juntas del Pacífico,” he said. “And you should know, they were asking about how to buy some property in town.”