Close coordination between police in Ecuador, Colombia and Mexico has ended in the arrest of Ángel Esteban Aguilar Morales, alias Lobo Menor, or Little Wolf, wanted for the assassination of Ecuadorian presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio in 2023.
Villavicencio was shot dead as he was leaving a campaign rally in the Ecuadorian capital, Quito, just ten days before the first round of the country’s presidential election. His alleged assassin, a leading figure in Los Lobos, one of Ecuador’s most violent drug trafficking gangs, later fled to Colombia, using fake travel documents.
At the request of Ecuadorian authorities, INTERPOL published a Red Notice against Aguilar Morales on 16 February this year. In parallel, Ecuador’s national police sent a team of investigators to Colombia, but the suspect then fled to Mexico, where he was arrested on 18 March. He was immediately deported to Colombia and then taken to the border with Ecuador, in a procedure coordinated by authorities in the three countries. Aguilar Morales is now awaiting trial in El Encuentro high security prison in the west Ecuadorian province of Santa Elena.
“The capture of Lobo Menor is a significant blow to one of Ecuador’s most notorious and violent criminal gangs,” says Lieutenant Colonel Richard Riera Guaman, Head of INTERPOL’s Quito bureau. “He was locked up in our facility less than forty days after publication of the Red Notice against him and that was made possible thanks to the excellent cooperation of all concerned, both the national police forces in the three Latin American countries and our colleagues at INTERPOL’s global headquarters”.