Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday that the United States was adding an Ecuadorean gang, Los Tiguerones, to its terrorism list, seeking to deny the group access to financial resources and U.S. banking networks.
The action, which Mr. Rubio spoke about during a brief visit to Quito, the capital of Ecuador, is the latest in a series of terrorist designations of criminal groups in Latin America undertaken by the Trump administration.
The State Department is designating Los Tiguerones as both a foreign terrorist organization and a specially designated global terrorist. Those formal labels give the U.S. government legal tools to try to freeze or seize assets linked to the group that are in the U.S. financial and banking systems.
While terrorism designations by the State and Treasury departments can have financial consequences, they do not give the U.S. military any legal basis to carry out operations against groups added to the list. The Trump administration has nevertheless emphasized such designations when announcing military actions against them.
Since last year, the Trump administration has added about 20 groups in Latin America to the U.S. list of terrorist groups, laying the groundwork for potential military strikes. Trump administration officials have compared the new “anti-cartel” push in Latin America to the military campaign against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
“These groups became more powerful than governments in many cases,” Mr. Rubio said. “And if you don’t confront these groups, they will eat these countries alive.”
Military strikes alone are not enough, he said. “They have to be dismantled financially,” he said.
Mr. Rubio made his remarks after meeting with Daniel Noboa, the president of Ecuador.
Mr. Noboa, a millionaire businessman, took office in 2023 on a promise of cracking down on violent crime, which has been surging in recent years in Ecuador, in part because of the presence of Mexican drug cartels. He was the first South American leader to enter into a formal agreement with the Trump administration to carry out joint military operations.
A year ago, Mr. Rubio met with Mr. Noboa on his first visit to Ecuador as secretary of state and said the State Department was designating two crime groups operating in Ecuador, Los Lobos and Los Choneros, as terrorist organizations. The department later added a third gang in the country, Chone Killers, to the list.
In March, the Pentagon said it was working with the Ecuadorean military to carry out operations against designated terrorist groups. The U.S. military worked with Ecuadorean forces to bomb a site that American officials called a drug camp, but a New York Times investigation found that the Ecuadorean military had actually attacked a dairy farm and its workers.
As cartels and drug gangs split into rival factions, U.S. officials are eager to designate splinter groups as terrorist organizations, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. Officials are pressing leaders in Latin America to also designate the groups as terrorists and to assertively deploy their security forces against them, the people said.
Los Tiguerones drew international attention for their role in a 2024 attack on an Ecuadorean television studio. Gunmen stormed the set during a live broadcast amid a wave of violence that swept the country after a notorious gang leader escaped from prison.
But their actual capabilities are limited, said Glaeldys González Calanche, an analyst with the International Crisis Group who studies Ecuador.
The group is strongest in Esmeraldas, a violence-plagued coastal province where the gang grew through cocaine trafficking and other illicit activities. But Los Tiguerones have lost power and influence, largely as Los Lobos have expanded.
“It’s a group that had that moment of fame, that moment in the public spotlight, and it’s striking that they are now being brought into this framework of the fight,” Ms. González said.
While the designation of Los Tiguerones sends a powerful message about the U.S. commitment to fighting drug trafficking, it is unlikely to significantly disrupt the group’s finances. Los Tiguerones operates largely outside the formal banking system and is typically paid in drugs or weapons, which they often exchange for gold rather than dollars.
Mr. Rubio’s statement said the designation would help protect Americans by dismantling “cartels and narcoterrorist networks” in the region.
American officials have said that Ecuadorean gangs supply Mexican cartels. Yet regional experts say Ecuadorean gangs generally do not control major drug-trafficking routes and play a relatively small role in the broader trafficking chain. Even if Los Tiguerones was dismantled, other groups would likely move into the territory and markets they leave behind.
“They operate at the lowest links of the chain,” Ms. González said. “They provide services, like moving cargo from point A to point B. Ecuadorean groups are not decisive, they aren’t major players.”
The groups that the Trump administration has designated as terrorist since early 2025 include several Mexican cartels; transnational gangs like Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua; and four warring drug gangs in Ecuador.
Los Choneros, another designated group in Ecuador, is a powerful gang that U.S. officials have linked to several fishing vessels that they recently destroyed off Ecuador’s Coast, in an escalation of the U.S. military boat-strikes campaign.
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