Ecuador declares “war” on Colombian guerrilla groups following deadly ambush
President Noboa categorizes three FARC dissident groups as enemy combatants
Following an ambush last week in the Colombian-Ecuadorian borderlands that left 11 Ecuadorian soldiers dead, President Daniel Noboa expanded his “war” against organized crime in the country to include three dissident groups of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Through a presidential decree, Noboa declared his government now considers the “Oliver Sinisterra Front,” the “Comuneros del Sur” and the “Comandos de la Frontera,” to be state enemies of the “internal armed conflict” that he declared in 2024 to combat criminal gangs.
In recent years, Ecuador has become the most violent country in Latin America. Last year, the small South American country, with a population of just under 18 million people, averaged one murder every hour.
The categorization of the Colombian groups as enemy combatants follows a disastrous military operation in the Ecuadorian Amazon in Alto Punino, in the east of the country, on May 9. Soldiers carrying out an operation to dismantle a suspected illegal mining operation were ambushed in an attack that included “grenades, anti-personnel mines,” improvised explosives, and “long-range rifles”, according to statements from military officials.
The attack was blamed on the Comandos de la Frontera, who since their formation in 2017 have become the dominant force in most of the Colombian borderlands. Three dissident fighters were also killed in the confrontation. Ecuadorian officials claim a leader from the Comandos de la Frontera was among the dead.
The Comandos deny participating in the ambush in public statements and offered “to hunt down those responsible.”
Ecuadorian security forces have launched an investigation into what they believe was a serious intelligence breach that gave advance notice of the operation to the group that controlled the illegal mine.
Organized criminal groups notoriously infiltrate Ecuadorian security forces, police and military alike, via bribery, personal threats, as well as by inserting members of criminal groups into permanent positions within their ranks.
The Ecuadorian government claims Comandos de la Frontera has allied with Los Lobos, one of Ecuador's largest criminal gangs, to control illegal mining in several sectors of the Ecuadorian Amazon near the Colombian border, such as the upper Punino river basin.
Earlier this week, Ecuador deployed 1,500 troops to the region to “hunt” fighters from the Comandos.
The group was formed originally out of FARC fighters who rejected the rebel group’s 2016 peace deal with the Colombian government, but also includes former right-wing paramilitary fighters and drug-smuggling organizations. As the Comandos effectively achieved hegemonic control of cocaine smuggled by land routes into Ecuador in recent years, it also absorbed structures that the FARC once battled during Colombia’s civil war. They currently control territory in the departments of Putumayo, Cauca, Nariño, Caquetá, and Amazonas.
According to previous investigations by both Ecuadorian security forces as well as journalists and academics, however, the Comandos prefer not to smuggle cocaine within Ecuador, preferring instead to pay local criminal groups to do so. They have also been accused of acting as suppliers at the border for Mexican cartels, who then use local groups to transport shipments to Ecuadorian port cities such as Guayaquil.
One of the other FARC dissident groups mentioned in Noboa’s decree, the Oliver Sinisterra Front, was responsible for the kidnapping and gruesome murder of an Ecuadorian journalism team in 2018.
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