Is Ecuador’s US-Born President, Daniel Noboa, the Most Powerful Drug Trafficker in Latin America?

“Noboa and Ecuador today export 70% of the cocaine consumed by the world. Most of it leaves on this criminal’s merchant ships and is packed in his banana facilities.”

On June 8, Monika Silva Koniuszek, a 41-year old Polish journalist and activist, was found dead at her home in Montañita, a coastal town in the Ecuadorian province of Santa Elena. The single mother of two daughters, aged four and nine, was found on the floor with a noose around her neck.

For Ecuadorian authorities, it was supposed to be an open-and-shut case. A day after Silva Koniuszek’s death, before the results of the autopsy were even available, Ecuador’s Minister of the Interior, John Reimberg, announced that the investigating team’s working hypothesis was suicide.

“The necessary evidence to reach that conclusion was found at the scene,” he told local media.

On June 19, however, an autopsy performed in Guayaquil revealed that the actual cause of death was a blow to the head and strangulation.

“Based on the forensic reports, we are certain that this was a violent death; therefore, the alleged suggestion that it was a suicide falls apart,” said attorney Lita Martínez, director of the Ecuadorian Centre for the Promotion and Action of Women.

As The Guardian reports, Silva Koniuszek spent the last decade of her life investigating and denouncing environmental crimes and corruption in Ecuador alongside local journalists. This had made her many powerful enemies. However, in the months leading up to her death, she had begun to investigate allegations against Noboa Trading, the fruit conglomerate belonging to the billionaire family of Ecuador’s US-born president, Daniel Noboa.

💢 NEW: Anti-corruption Polish activist Monika Silva Koniuszek was murdered after investigating allegations involving Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa’s family business, including claims cocaine had been seized in banana shipments exported by Noboa Trading, her friends and… pic.twitter.com/vtzWWVai0H

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) June 23, 2026

Colleagues of Silva Koniuszek said she had been investigating accusations that several tonnes of cocaine had been seized in Noboa Trading banana containers. However, high-ranking Ecuadorian judicial officials were apparently stalling the investigations.

“In my investigation into drug trafficking in Ecuador, my latest revelations were regarding links with the Noboa Group; since then I have kept running into the Noboa Group,” Silva Koniuszek said.

Shortly before she was killed, the Polish activist-journalist told friends that she had delivered a dossier of allegations to the US embassy in Quito, which was probably not a great idea given Washington’s long history of supporting drug cartels and propping up corrupt, authoritarian governments in Latin America.

Silva Koniuszek’s untimely death made headlines in her native Poland, where the Noboa government’s claims that she had taken her own life were treated with scepticism. Her friend, Joanna Cuper, told Polish broadcaster TVP Info that the activist had claimed she was “being followed and watched”. “None of us believe that he committed suicide,” she said.

The Polish prosecutor’s office confirmed last week that it had requested mutual legal assistance from Ecuadorian authorities investigating his death, and suggested that it would want to be closely involved in the investigation. For its part, the Delegation of the European Union (EU) in Ecuador has called for a “rapid” and “independent” investigation to clarify Silva’s death.

Which begs the question: how can anyone possibly expect the Ecuadorian authorities to conduct an “independent” investigation into Silva Koniuszek’s murder when one of the suspects in her death is none other then the president of Ecuador, Daniel Naboa, whose family business Silva Koniuszek was investigating?

Ecuador: World’s Most Important Conduit for Cocaine

Ecuador’s importance in the narcotics trade has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade. By recent estimates, more than 70% of the world’s cocaine now passes through the country’s ports on its way to consumers in the West. In that time, the country has gone from being one of the safest in Latin America to being the most dangerous.

According to recent revelations, a Panama-domiciled company registered in President Noboa’s name is heavily involved in that trade. The first time this was brought to public attention was during a presidential debate in 2025 when challenger Luisa González directly accused Noboa of trafficking cocaine. Instead of denying the charge, Noboa tacitly admitted that there had been cases of drug trafficking through the company’s shipments but he denied any wrongdoing.

Since then, a March 2025 investigation by Colombian outlet Revista Raya highlighted multiple cocaine seizures totalling 700 kilograms between 2020 and 2022.

About 700 kilos of cocaine were seized in the port of Naportec, Guayaquil, by the Ports and Airports Intelligence Unit of the National Police (UIPA), between 2020 and 2022. Those reports from the Ecuadorian Police remained hidden, since the owners of the company from which the drugs were seized were the Noboa family — that is, the family of the President of the Republic and current candidate for reelection, Daniel Noboa.

The documents, to which RAYA had access, detail how the cocaine was camouflaged in the banana containers of the Noboa Trading company and how one of the defendants was defended by the current Minister of Health of Ecuador, Edgar José Lama Von Buchwald…

Part of the investigation was revealed last weekend by Ecuadorian journalist Andrés Durán, who after releasing several of the official documents with the reports of the seizure of the drug, had to leave the country due to death threats and judicial harassment by the ruling political party National Democratic Action Movement (ADN). In dialogue with RAYA Magazine, Durán spoke about his investigation and his departure from Ecuador: “This is the first documented case in the history of Ecuador in which a presidential family would be involved with cocaine trafficking. The Noboa family controls the entire circuit of the banana export business, from planting, harvesting, to transport and private ports. There is no doubt that the death threats are closely linked to this investigation.”

Just owning a company in a tax haven is illegal under Ecuadorian law, which in and of itself should be enough to disqualify Noboa’s presidency. It’s also worth noting that the banana empire built by the president’s father, Alvaro Noboa, owes more than $93 million in unpaid taxes to the Ecuadorian state.

In December 2025, the Amsterdam-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) raised the pressure on Noboa by revealing that alleged Balkan drug traffickers had claimed in an encrypted conversation to have “exclusive rights” to traffic cocaine disguised in export banana containers belonging to the Noboa Corporation:

A confidential document from Croatia’s prosecutor’s office recorded two people, using the encrypted messaging platform Sky ECC and who are only identified by anonymous PIN numbers, boasting that “no one but them” had permission to ship cocaine in the containers of Noboa Trading Co TCN S.A.

Noboa Trading is part of Noboa Corporation, a sprawling business empire that produces bananas under the Bonita brand and is run by the family of Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa. Neither Noboa Trading Co. nor President Noboa’s office responded to requests for comment…

In their encrypted chats, the alleged traffickers referred to three specific shipments of cocaine and relayed details of date, ship name and container number. The reporters cross-checked the data shared in their discussions with actual banana shipments from Noboa Trading using shipment records and export data.

For example, they mentioned a shipment of 430 kilos of cocaine hidden in container MEDU9747725, which they said left Ecuador on January 25, 2021. By consulting shipping records and export data, reporters confirmed that Noboa Trading did indeed ship that same container on that date.

The three shipments, which reporters from KRIK, OCCRP and the Investigative Journalism Bureau — a Canadian independent journalism organization — examined in detail, were shipped from the Ecuadorian port of Guayaquil.

This is a key point. Most of the drugs transported from Latin America to the US and Europe is shipped in, well, ships — not small fishing boats of the like the US Southern Command has been bombing into smithereens in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific for the past seven months. This is one of a number of reasons why Trump’s recent claims that sea-based drug trafficking to the US has decreased by over 97% in recent months should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Roberto Saviano, journalist and author of Gomorra and Zero, Zero and Zero, explained just how important fast ports are to the global drugs trade in an interview with El Pais a decade ago:

One thing that works in the narcos’ favour is that a port that handles containers slowly is as good as dead. A port that receives and processes many containers as quickly as possible is alive and kicking. To give a hypothetical example, if a port were to decide to check all of the containers it handled, no company would ever want to use it. The faster the port, the better. And it’s this paradox that helps to make the drug trade possible.

And it’s Ecuador’s massive banana export trade, together with its network of fast ports in Guayaquil, its totally dollarised economy and its geographic proximity to Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the three countries that produce 99% of the world’s cocaine supply, that has helped transform the Andean nation into such a key hub of the global narcotics trade.

And nobody has more control over Ecuador’s banana trade — its cultivation, its packaging and its transportation for export — than Noboa’s family business, Corporación Noboa. This makes Noboa himself arguably the most powerful drug trafficker in the world, according to the veteran Colombian journalist Gonzalo Guillén.

Noboa and Ecuador today export 70% of the cocaine consumed by the world. Most of it leaves on this criminal’s merchant ships and is packed in his banana facilities.

In fact, he was sworn in as president with his nose full of cocaine and carrying a bag of the powder in plain sight in the outer pocket of his jacket.* He is the Pablo Escobar of Ecuador.

More than half of his term has been spent outside the country, negotiating with traffickers around the world and keeping money from his cocaine sales in tax havens.

He never strikes a noticeable blow against drug trafficking, because it is his business. He only occasionally attacks small traffickers who compete with him and thus maintains his world leadership in drug trafficking.

Guillén is renowned for his fierce, high-stakes reporting on organised crime, drug trafficking and corruption at the highest levels of power in Latin America, for which he has received numerous awards on both sides of the Atlantic as well as been forced into exile during the government of Alvaro Uribe, another notorious narco-president. In other words, Guillén knows of what he speaks.

It’s also true that many of the most powerful drug cartel capos in Latin America have been taken out of the picture in the past couple of years by the US government’s “kingpin” strategy, including Ismael Mario Zambada García, also known as El Mayo, and Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho”. The so-called Chapitos have also absconded to the US, where they will serve as star witnesses in the US’ case against the Sinaloa cartel.

Plus, Noboa has one thing at his disposal that most drug traffickers, including even Pablo Escobar, could only dream of: unlimited access to the power of the organs of State, albeit a heavily weakened one. And he is using that power with abandon, as CEPR reported a few days ago:

President Daniel Noboa’s authoritarianism has accelerated sharply in recent months, further deepening a trend that began soon after he first took office in 2023. During his first term, Noboa irregularly removed his vice president and raided the Mexican embassy. Since then, he has threatened Constitutional Court judges, imposed a prolonged state of emergency that has been linked to gross human rights abuses, and taken measures that shrink civic space. In recent months, through a mix of direct government actions and efforts by loyalists within key institutions, the president managed to block opposition parties from running in upcoming local elections, pursued criminal cases against political opponents, and intensified pressure on judges.

It’s not just the power of the Ecuadorian state that Noboa has backing him up; he also has the US government and military on his side — provided he serves Washington’s hegemonic interests. In recent months, Noboa has opened the door not only to US troops, less than a year after the people of Ecuador voted overwhelmingly against the return of US military bases, but also a host of US government agencies, including the DEA and even the FBI.

In return, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has a penchant for protecting Latin America’s “narco politicians” as well as his own familial connections to drug traffickers and seems hell-bent on recreating Iran-Contra, as Maureen Tkacik has reported for American Prosect, has described Noboa’s narco-regime as a “key ally” in Latin America.

Noboa should be wary, however. As former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reportedly once said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

Even as he escalates his authoritarian power grabs at home, Noboa should be mindful of what has happened to previous US-aligned narco-presidents in Latin America. Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was deposed in the US’ 1989 invasion of Panama and sentenced to multiple life sentences on drug trafficking charges in a Florida court after Noriega, a long-standing CIA asset, began to get ideas above his station.

It was a similar story for Honduras’ former gangster president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was extradited to the US during the Biden administration and sentenced to 45 years’ imprisonment by a New York court before being pardoned by Trump late last year, just two years into serving the sentence.