1-800 EXTORTION is the number that the state of Ecuador encourages citizens to call if they have been victims of an infamous extortionary method colloquially referred to as “vaccines” (“vacunas” in Spanish).
Extortionists collect vaccine payments from local businesses periodically, charging them for the promise of “protection.” Cases of extortion in Ecuador have been steadily rising since 2022. Although vastly underreported, confirmed reports of vaccines increased by 300 percent compared to the previous year.
A majority of these cases come from regions controlled by Ecuador’s most powerful drug trafficking gangs, namely Los Choneros, Los Lobos, and Los Tiguerones. This is no coincidence. As the presence of criminal groups in Ecuador has grown, they have increasingly turned towards extortion as a reliable source of income to fund their illicit activities and to expand their control over strategic areas through intimidation.
For Ecuador, a former “island of peace” that has turned into the country with the highest homicide rate in Latin America, the commodity of protection is more valued than ever before. Increasingly — and especially in areas that have long lacked adequate state presence — “protection” is controlled not by the state but by criminal groups. Yet this protection offered by extortionists is fictitious, as gangs manufacture the very threats they claim to mitigate, forcing businesses to pay for protection from violence they themselves produce.
In the transaction of vaccines, criminal groups hold a monopoly over protection, deciding when it is provided or withheld. This dynamic is fundamentally paradoxical, as businesses cannot thrive because of the presence of vaccines, but they simultaneously cannot survive unless they pay the vaccines.
The economic toll is immediate and visible. A study by the Ecuadorian Observatory of Organized Crime (OECO) found that 32 percent of small, medium, and large businesses have been victims of extortion. Elena and Ramiro, a couple from Guayaquil who owned a small food stall, were approached by two men in motorcycles demanding a $3,000 monthly vaccine fee. Small owners already surviving on tight margins, like Elena and Ramiro, have been unable to continue paying the vaccination fee, resulting in mass closures of businesses across the country.
But the stakes go beyond profit margins. Soraya, a mother from Quito, received a threat on the phone, where her perpetrators told her that they knew her daughter’s daily routine. Maria, a mother from Guayaquil, was called by a man who told her he would kidnap her children if she did not pay him $500. In an even grimmer case, Dr. Steven Aguirre Giler, a rural doctor in the Guayas province, was fatally shot for not paying his vaccine, despite already having filed a complaint of extortion with the state. As Latin America expert Lucia Dammert explains, extortion is an “easy crime to commit” because it flourishes in environments where the state provides little protection. In such environments, the only rational calculation is survival.
For Soraya, Maria, and thousands of others, that calculation does not include calling 1-800 EXTORTION because they know that the state is powerless in protecting them or their loved ones. This concern is not unfounded, as in 2022, the Ministry of the Interior itself reported that only 1,105 out of 4,500 reports were resolved. Research has shown that victims who perceive the police as incapable or corrupt tend to comply more with extortionists’ demands out of fear of reprisals. Additionally, extortion victims come to accept extortion payments over time, seeing them as a kind of tax — paid not to the state, but to the illegitimate actors that nonetheless control the street outside their door.
In this context, vaccines come to function as a parallel form of governance, one that is rival to and superior to the state. Criminal gangs are able to collect stable revenue streams through vaccine taxes while reproducing a system of impunity where people know they cannot ask the state for help.
This parallel form of governance has especially burgeoned in places like Durán and Guayaquil, ironically referred to as “sanctuary states,” where the state has no effective control, and gangs can operate with total liberty. Within sanctuaries, vaccines extend beyond businesses into every aspect of daily life; private residences, schools, universities, and hospitals become victims of vaccines.
Those who do not trust their institutions contend with closing down their businesses, such as Jesús, who had to shut down his small restaurant after he could not pay the $1,500 vaccine fee. Others make the difficult choice to flee, such as Sanchez, who left her business and home in Guayaquil because of her inability to pay the weekly vaccines.
And yet others, with nowhere to go and no state to turn to, take matters into their own hands. In January 2026, severed heads were found on a beach in Puerto López, left with a warning to extortionists to stop demanding vaccines from local fishermen. The bleak image of severed heads on a beach is a symptom of what happens when the state is unable to deliver on its most basic obligation to citizens: protection.
Elena and Ramiro fled to the United States to escape their extortionary debts and were later deported back to Ecuador. Soraya has to live with the fact that someone out there knows her daughter’s routine. Maria had to send her children away. Jesús had to give up on his business. Sanchez was forced to abandon her home country. Aguirre Giler’s family continues to mourn his death while seeking justice. A hotline is only as powerful as the institution behind it, and in Ecuador, that institution has long forfeited the trust of the people it was meant to serve. Until the state can offer something more than a phone number, vaccines will continue evoking fear rather than the promise of protection.
Featured Image Source: El Universo