Treasury Sanctions Ecuador's Cocaine Fishing Fleet

Fifteen people and ten Manta-based vessels are blocked for feeding Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG. The action lands alongside a lethal US strike campaign that has killed more than 220 people, and that the government's own Drug Enforcement Administration now says has not reduced the cocaine reaching American shores.

Fifteen Names, Ten Boats, One Tuna Port

On August 20, 2026, the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated 15 Ecuador-based individuals and entities and blocked 10 fishing vessels operating out of Manta, a port city in Manabi province, accusing them of running a cocaine pipeline that feeds Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel and the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG). Treasury's account names Alfonso Mero Mero, his sons Roberth Alfonso and Edwar Alexis Mero Arcentales, and Julio Javier Mero Franco, who Treasury alleges coordinated an estimated 30 to 40 tons of cocaine a month for the gang Los Choneros, moving it from Manta on fishing vessels used as cover, then onward by “go-fast” vessels, small, high-speed boats built to outrun patrol craft, north through the Eastern Pacific toward Mexico and the United States.

Sinaloa Cartel, Los Lobos Implicated

The designation was issued under Executive Order 14059, the counter-narcotics sanctions authority Treasury has used repeatedly since it was signed in December 2021. It blocks the designees' US property and bars US persons from doing business with them or entities they control, and it is legally separate from a terrorism designation. Los Choneros and Los Lobos, the two Ecuadorian gangs the network is linked to, were designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs) by the State Department on September 4, 2025, a different action under different authority. Treasury's release invokes that earlier terrorism designation by name, but the August 20 action itself sanctions; it does not newly designate anyone a terrorist.

Treasury's Fourth Round Against These Networks Since 2015

The August 20 action extends a sanctions campaign running back over a decade on the Mexican side and two years on the Ecuadorian side. OFAC first designated CJNG and leaders Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes (“El Mencho”) and Abigael Gonzalez Valencia under the Kingpin Act in 2015. On the Ecuadorian side, it sanctioned Los Choneros and leader Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar (“Fito”) on February 7, 2024, and Los Lobos and leader Wilmer Geovanny Chavarria Barre (“Pipo”) on June 6, 2024. Treasury states the August 20 action is one of nearly 30 such actions against more than 300 individuals and entities taken against cartel and gang networks since the start of 2025, a characterization of its own record. Chavarria was arrested in Spain on November 16, 2025, after evading capture for roughly four years, per Treasury's account. El Mencho himself was killed in a Mexican military operation in Tapalpa, Jalisco, on February 21 to 22, 2026; his stepson, Juan Carlos Valencia Gonzalez, is reported, though not confirmed by any government document, to have succeeded him.

Behind the Sanctions: A Campaign That Has Killed 220 People

The August 20 designation lands inside a second, much larger and more lethal US campaign against drug trafficking by sea.

By a tracked, sourced casualty count, Southern Spear had killed at least 221 people in at least 64 strikes on 65 vessels as of June 21, 2026; Reuters reported on August 15 that the campaign had by then “destroyed 67 vessels and killed more than 220 people since last September.” The administration has told Congress it considers itself in a “non-international armed conflict” with “unlawful combatants” and claims “absolute and complete authority” to conduct the strikes. A body of law-of-war experts described in reporting as holding “pretty tight consensus” instead characterizes the strikes as illegal extrajudicial killings. Neither position is resolved here, and no government source reviewed for this piece discloses public, individualized evidence that any specific person killed was a trafficker.

Nowhere is the ambiguity sharper than on Ecuador's own coast, where two Manabi-province fishing vessels, the Fiorella and the Negra Francisca Duarte II, were struck at sea in incidents survivors and a local human-rights group say carry the hallmarks of a US strike, one crew describing being hit by a drone and intercepted by armed, English-speaking men before being returned home by a Salvadoran navy vessel. Southern Command has not confirmed responsibility, declining to comment “for operational security and force protection reasons,” and no government confirmation of US involvement in either incident exists in the record reviewed for this piece.

The DEA Said Prices Were Rising. Its Own Review Says They Never Did.

Whether any of this is reducing the cocaine supply is where the government's own account splits against itself. In November 2025, DEA Administrator Terry Cole told CBS News that wholesale cocaine prices had climbed 30 to 45 percent per kilogram, which he attributed to the strike campaign, citing rising costs at “first stop” transit points in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Honduras. Eight months later, a DEA internal assessment reviewed by the Washington Post reached the opposite finding, putting cocaine's Florida price at $13,000 to $15,000 per kilogram as of July 2026, roughly half what it cost five years earlier.

DEA analysts, internal assessment reported by the Washington Post, 27 July 2026

That contradiction is the closest thing this story has to a household-level finding. The chain runs, in principle, from a Manta fishing boat to a go-fast vessel to a Mexican cartel to a US street price. Treasury and Southern Command frame the sanctions and the strikes as raising costs for traffickers, a mechanism, not a measurement. The DEA's mid-2026 review is the closest thing to an actual measurement found for this piece, and it found the mechanism has not shown up at the register: no traceable change in what cocaine costs or how available it is in the United States.

Ecuador's Homicides Jumped 30 Percent in 2025

None of this is happening apart from what Ecuador's own numbers show. The country recorded 9,216 homicides in 2025, up roughly 30 percent from 7,063 the year before, per Ecuador's Interior Ministry, reversing a 2024 decline. Its homicide rate reached roughly 50 per 100,000 residents, among the highest in Latin America, and gang violence killed more than 3,600 people between January and late November 2025, a 42 percent rise over the same period in 2024, per the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

Ecuador's government answered with a military request of its own. Defense Minister Gian Carlo Loffredo announced two US warships would patrol Ecuador's territorial waters after he met Southern Command's Gen. Francis L. Donovan in Manta, saying the deployment would “triple our interdiction capabilities in the maritime zone.” Donovan welcomed the sanctions: “By continuing to apply total systemic friction, we are denying revenue to narco-terrorists and dismantling the drug cartels that threaten the safety, security, and sovereignty of the Western Hemisphere.”

No document reviewed for this piece shows whether any person or vessel named on August 20 was also a target of a Southern Spear strike. Treasury's release describes an asset freeze, not a strike, and that gap in the record is unresolved here.