US designates Ecuador’s Chone Killers gang as terrorist organization

The State Department on Wednesday designated the Ecuadorian gang the Chone Killers as a foreign terrorist organization.

“Chone Killers is an Ecuadorian gang that has committed numerous attacks targeting civilians, law enforcement officers, and government officials, including high-profile assassinations of public officials,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.

Rubio separately said on the social platform X that gangs from Ecuador assist the Mexican cartels in moving and exporting illicit drugs.

He assured that President Trump, partnered with Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, “will continue to protect our hemisphere by keeping illicit drugs off our streets and disrupting the revenue streams funding violent narcoterrorists.”

Ecuador’s foreign ministry praised the announcement, stating on X in a translation from Spanish that cooperation with the U.S. is “fundamental to dismantling transnational mafias and guaranteeing the safety, stability and peace of all Ecuadorians.”

The U.S. designated the Ecuadorian criminal groups Los Lobos and Los Choneros, the group that the Chone Killers splintered from, as foreign terrorist organizations after Rubio made a trip to Ecuador in September.

In March, the U.S. launched operations against “designated terrorist organizations” in Latin America with Ecuadorian armed forces alongside. Noboa said at the time that the U.S. joined its “regional allies” in his country’s battle against drug cartels, with about 70 percent of the world’s cocaine going through Ecuadorian ports.

Noboa’s tactics in combatting crime in Ecuador have been questioned inside and outside the country. In 2024, he authorized a police raid on Mexico’s Embassy in the capital, Quito, to arrest former Vice President Jorge Glas, a convicted criminal and a fugitive.

The Trump administration has sought to crack down on criminal gangs across Latin America, including Tren de Aragua in Venezuela. The announcement comes days after U.S. Southern Command (Southcom) launched a strike that killed Tren de Aragua leader Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, also known as Niño Guerrero.

The U.S. has also carried out a series of controversial strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean, killing at least 212 since early September.

Most notable in the Trump administration’s “armed conflict” with Latin American drug cartels, as Trump has described it, is when U.S. forces performed a successful raid in Caracas, capturing Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and bringing him to New York to face drug-smuggling charges.

The Associated Press contributed.