Published on: 2 June 2025
On 2 June 2025, ACLED expanded its Ecuador dataset to include gang violence. This expansion improves its coverage of the country in a way that reflects evolving security dynamics. This update introduces newly coded events from 1 January 2023 to present, with retrospective coverage for prior years currently underway.
In total, the update adds around 7,250 new events and includes 190 corrections to previously published data. Also, over 7,145 fatalities were added to new events in the dataset for the period of coverage. ACLED also integrated 10 new sources as part of this project. These sources contribute not only to the coverage of gang violence but also improve coverage of a wide range of event types in Ecuador.
Additionally, the update introduces the geographic disaggregation of events to the neighborhood level in Guayaquil and Quito. The disaggregation improved the granularity of the data and allows further analysis of trends related to urban conflict.
Rationale for inclusion
The decision to incorporate gang violence into ACLED’s Ecuador dataset follows the team’s assessment of whether the country meets the established benchmarks for determining when gang violence qualifies as political violence. The assessment found that Ecuador meets all three key criteria since at least 2021:
- Public safety and security are demonstrably at risk.
- Criminal actors exert de facto territorial control in specific areas.
- Gang violence is frequent, organized, and publicly executed.
The benchmark assessment indicated that gangs in Ecuador are not merely criminal actors, but significant political agents shaping local governance and defying state capacity to deliver services and provide security. The escalation of violence since late 2020 — including attacks in public or that result in mass casualties, targeted assassinations of government officials and political candidates, and bombings, along with the growing evidence of state-challenging behavior by these groups — warrants systematic inclusion of gang-related events in the dataset. Additional details on ACLED’s benchmark assessments and coding rules for organized criminal violence can be found in our public methodology document, Gang Violence: Concepts, benchmarks, and coding rules.
In recent years, flourishing illicit economies and erratic state policies have allowed local criminal groups to breed, fueling gang expansion. They are now active in over two-thirds of the country’s municipalities, and violent competition — which morphed into the fragmentation of gangs — with over 37 groups operating in the country. See ACLED’s full report based on newly published data, ‘Ecuador’s Noboa declared war on 22 gangs. In his new term, he faces many more.’ for detailed analysis.
ACLED conducted extensive consultations with Ecuadorian and regional experts and specialists on gang and criminal dynamics in Ecuador, alongside a review of both national and subnational trends in organized criminal violence. This work informed the creation of a preliminary set of inclusion criteria tailored specifically to Ecuador’s context. These criteria were tested against a broad sample of events collected by ACLED and refined accordingly.
Data coverage and scope
Date of publication: The data were published on 2 June 2025.
Span of data coverage: 1 January 2023 to present. ACLED is currently coding data for prior years, which will be released at a later date.
New events added: 7,249, including 4,537 new Violence against civilians events, 1193 new Battles events, 234 new Protest events, 189 new Riot events, 275 new Explosions/remote violence events, and 821 new Strategic development events
Number of events corrected: 190
New Fatalities added to dataset: 7,145
Expansion of source coverage
As part of this project, ACLED integrated 10 new national and regional sources, improving coverage across a broad range of event types, including events not limited to gang violence. These sources have also yielded new information that enhances ACLED coverage of Protest and Riot event types. These new sources include: Diario Extra, Ecuador Comunicación, Ecuador en Vivo, Ecuavisa, Esmeraldas News, La Gaceta, La República, Machala Movil, Primicias, and Wambra Medio Comunitario.
These sources are currently included in the data from January 2023 to present, which contributed to an over 700% overall increase in the number of events for the period of coverage. This is as a result of both the addition of all gang-related events, and the improvement of overall coverage of all event types due to improved source coverage. Please note the limitations of temporal analysis.
Geographic disaggregation of Guayaquil and Quito
In order to enhance granularity in Ecuador’s urban locations to allow for more nuanced urban analysis, events in both Guayaquil and Quito have been disaggregated from the city level to the urban parish (neighborhood) level.
In both cities, events that were previously coded to the city location are now assigned to specific neighborhoods where the event is known to have occurred. Guayaquil city is now divided into 15 urban parishes, and Quito is divided into 8 urban parishes. These will appear in the data as “Guayaquil – Ximena”, “Guayaquil – Rocafuerte”, etc., and “Quito – Eloy Alfaro”, etc.
Temporal limitations
Users analyzing trends over time should note that this update applies only to data from January 2023 onward. Data from earlier years are not yet coded using the same set of sources or inclusion criteria. The increase in events beginning in 2023 should be understood in the context of expanded coverage and methodology changes, rather than an actual increase in violence starting in January 2023.
