On Ecuador’s cocaine coast, with a fisherman who turned to smuggling

“One more trip,” he says. “And then I’ll stop.” He’s a fisherman by trade, born and raised in the coastal city of Manta — a place once known for tuna and tranquility. But these days, the fish are harder to find. The trips are longer. And the money, he says, just isn’t there anymore. “As a fisherman, in a month you can make $300,” he says. “But with the drug, the white one… that’s the money, brother!” One trip, running cocaine by sea to Mexico, pays $60,000, he says. Half up front. Half when you make it back alive. “I think that if I get one more trip, I would go, to try my luck,” he says, adding he wants to buy his mother a house. “And then I’ll stop.” He agrees to take us out — not on a drug run, but to show us how it’s done. The routes, the tactics, the escape paths. He asks that we not use his name or show his face. If this was his one last trip, he says he would have dozens of black sacks of cocaine — worth an estimated $500,000 in Ecuador but as much as $5 million on US streets, he says — hidden beneath the false floors of “pregnant” speedboats he and three others power across the Pacific. “We leave from here to get to one point over there in Mexico, where there’s a boat waiting for us. We don’t enter a port,” he explains. Once the drop is made, they head back to Ecuador, this time with a cargo of fish as a cover story. “If I come back with nothing,” he says, “the people will quickly realize one is involved in something that’s not good.” The fisherman says he isn’t proud of what he does. And he knows the risks: rough waters, failing engines, criminal rivalries, and coast guard patrols. “If we are stopped, we lose everything… we don’t know if they stop us to rob us or kill us.” Still, he goes, moving with a youthful energy in his voice and a face weathered by decades at sea. They carry just enough to last: food, water, energy bars — “six sacks of supplies,” he says. Now in his late 50s, he says fear doesn’t stop him. “Fear, only towards God,” he says. “I know it’s a crime. I know it goes against God… but I have to support my mother.” She runs a small evangelical church and pleads with him not to go. “‘Don’t be involved in that,’ she tells me. But I tell her, ‘Mom, you can’t clean anymore… I’m the one who needs to care for you,’” he says. When we meet him, the sun is dipping behind the Pacific. The dock is alive with fishing boats weaving between larger vessels anchored offshore. The water glows in the orange light and the air is thick with the sharp smell of gasoline. As we pull away, another boat full of police officers drifts past. The fisherman smiles and waves, confidently. The officers wave back. Patrolling a paradise under siege Several hundred miles from the Ecuadorian mainland, the waters off the Galápagos Islands glisten with postcard beauty. But this stretch of the Pacific has become a critical corridor in the cocaine trade — and a battleground in Ecuador’s fight against it. On patrol with Ecuador’s navy, a coast guard captain surveys the horizon from the deck of his vessel. CNN is withholding his name due to growing concerns that military officials are being targeted by the very traffickers they’re trying to stop. “The area where drugs are smuggled is about 200 miles off the shore… right by the limits of the Galápagos exclusive economic zone with the high seas,” he says. It’s only March, and already his crew has seized six tons of cocaine. “Last year, we caught 15 tons,” he adds — noting this year’s pace, if sustained, could nearly double last year’s haul. The captain says their first responsibility is saving lives at sea — shipwrecks, distress calls, rescue operations. But close behind is the fight against organized crime. “What’s happening is the boats (the drug runners) are using are not massive, so they need to refuel. Some of these refueling stations are in Galápagos, and they then continue onto Central America,” he explains. “That’s why our navy is looking for the fuel… because it’s one of the ways the narco-traffickers move drugs.” What officials call the “gas stations at sea” look like fishing boats — nets tossed off the sides, poles out for show — but they’re part of a vast narco-logistics network. Quietly stationed near the Galápagos Islands, each contains up to 40 large canisters of fuel to supply the high-speed boats running cocaine north toward Mexico and the United States. The strategy is simple: stay just outside Ecuador’s territorial waters, avoid major patrol routes, and supply the drug runners as they go. If they’re not intercepted, the vessels link up mid-ocean — often under cover of night — and continue their journey, undetected. It’s a supply chain built for stealth — and for speed. And it’s helping fuel a wave of cartel-driven violence that’s turned Ecuador’s coastal cities into some of the deadliest in Latin America. ‘Our fishermen are mules not traffickers’ Many of those who take these trips never return. In a modest home near the port, more than two dozen women crowd into Solanda Bermello’s living room — mothers, wives, and sisters of men who were arrested abroad or simply never came home. Some hold photographs. Others clutch letters, hoping someone might deliver them to husbands or sons locked up overseas. Bermello founded the Association of Mothers and Wives of Fishermen Detained in Other Countries nine years ago — after her own son was caught running drugs and imprisoned. Today, she says the group includes 380 members and they’ve documented more than 2,000 cases in Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the United States since January 2024. “We’ve sent letters to all those countries,” she says, pleading for repatriation of their loved ones. Many don’t know where their relatives are being held or even if they’re still alive. “Our fishermen are not drug traffickers,” Bermello says. “They are drug trafficking mules. Unfortunately, they are offered an amount of money that is so large for them… but at times they do not collect any of that money because they end up in prison and leave their families adrift and their children fatherless.” She says economic desperation, not ambition, is what drives them. “They are not drug traffickers,” she repeats. “Unfortunately, they do it because of the economic situation in the country — we don’t have money, we don’t have work, we don’t have a way to subsist.” Even those trying to fish legally, she says, aren’t safe. “Our fishermen are robbed by pirates. Not even making an honest living is possible.” She supports the idea of a US security presence returning to a nearby military base, vacated in 2009 after Ecuador banned foreign troops on its soil. “The US used to help us,” she says. “We need that again.” Newly re-elected president seeks help The streets of Ecuador’s coastal cities are soaked in blood. In just the first few months of 2025, more than 2,500 homicides have been recorded according to national police statistics — on pace to make this the deadliest year in the country’s history. InSight Crime, an organization that tracks and investigates crime in the Americas, now ranks Ecuador as having the highest homicide rate in Latin America. The surge in violence is fueled by a complex web of transnational crime: drug trafficking routes, turf wars, and brutal alliances between local gangs and foreign cartels. Ecuador’s location between Peru and Colombia, top producers of cocaine, and its efficient transport and export network has made it attractive to traffickers. It’s a crisis unfolding beyond its borders but with real consequences for the US — from the cocaine flooding into American cities to the migration pressures reshaping its southern border. Newly re-elected President Daniel Noboa says Ecuador can’t face it alone. “We would love to have US forces,” he told CNN last week in his first interview since winning the April 13 runoff vote. Noboa described the country’s gang war as a “transnational fight” — one that requires international backing to win. “There are plans,” he said. “We had conversations, we had a plan, we had options… and now we just need another meeting, post-election, to consolidate it.” But Noboa insists this won’t mean American boots patrolling Ecuadorian streets. “The control of the operations will be in the hands of our military and our police,” he said. US forces, he explained, would play a support role — focused on monitoring illegal operations and reinforcing Ecuador’s ability to stop them before they reach open waters. Last month, CNN obtained plans showing that Ecuador has already begun construction of a new naval facility in the coastal city of Manta — infrastructure a senior Ecuadorian official says is designed with US troops in mind. “It will be eventually occupied by US forces,” the official said. Noboa, who was born and educated in the United States, has pushed to revive Ecuador’s cooperation with Washington across multiple fronts, including security, trade, and migration. He says he wants to fix conditions at home to keep Ecuadorians from fleeing north, while also stepping up efforts to intercept drug flows bound for the US. He’s even expressed willingness to reform Ecuador’s constitution — potentially allowing for the formal return of a US military presence, like the one that existed from 1999 to 2009 at the now-defunct Manta Air Base. “That would help to keep peace,” Noboa said. “Like we had in the past.” As he heads into his second term, the young president is staking his political future on security. He has invited both US President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele — another right-wing populist who cracked down on gangs — to his inauguration in May. And he insists another meeting with US officials is just around the corner. “I think sooner than later,” he told CNN. For Ecuador, the war is already underway — at sea, on land, in homes and streets. And for the fisherman who once cast lines for tuna, it’s a war that pays. His next drug run, he says, might be his last. But the system that pulled him in shows no signs of stopping.