Neither Ecuador nor its allies in the Trump administration, which has launched a wave of strikes on boats they claim are carrying drugs in the Caribbean and the Pacific, have managed to stop them.

Albert de la Huerta, the former Ecuador attaché for the US Department of Homeland Security, said: “The Galapagos is used basically as a logistical support base for boats that are transporting narcotics northbound. They literally pull up like a gas station and fill up.”

The profits are enormous. In one journey, a fisherman can make between $25,000 and $90,000 selling fuel, compared to a few hundred dollars profit on an equivalent fishing trip.

Members of drug trafficking gang in Ecuador’s port city of Guayaquil were detained after gang-related violence in March

MARCOS PIN/AFP/GETTY

The islands, which have a population of only 33,000, rely on tourism. In 2024, nearly 280,000 tourists visited the islands and conservation efforts were awarded millions from international donors.

However, the tentacles of the cartels have wrapped around corrupt authorities who facilitate the sale of fuel to narcos, according to official sources on the islands.

In a harbour on the islands early one morning last month, Diego, a fisherman, explained how the trade worked. “If you’re a fisherman an intermediary will come to you and offer you cash. If you’d pay $50 for petrol, for example they’d offer you $150, just to go out far into the water and hand it over to the next person in the chain.”

The intermediary then sends GPS co-ordinates specifying where the cargo should be dropped off. Corrupt officials on the islands, whom Diego accused of being in the pay of the cartels, earn a cut of the sale.

“This is a mafia,” he said. “Everyone is involved, from top to bottom.”

The fuel cannisters are filled and transported to the fisherman, many of whom sell it on

Diego’s account was confirmed by sources within the Ecuadorian national and municipal authorities, naval intelligence, the armed forces and the coast guard, who have repeatedly sounded the alarm on the growing role that the Galapagos plays in trafficking narcotics.

The islands have until now been a rare place of stability at a time when Ecuador, a crucial stop-off for traffickers, is being torn apart by violence.

Five years ago, Ecuador was the most peaceful nation in Latin America. However, Mexican cartels realised it was easier to ship cocaine produced in Colombia and Peru to Ecuador for export by sea than to bring it by land though Central America.

It has since become the area’s most violent nation. Daniel Noboa, the president of Ecuador and a key US ally, announced that the country was in a state of internal armed conflict. The violence and the drug trade have continued to grow.

Today, 70 per cent of the world’s cocaine exports flow through Ecuador. About 65 per cent of these exports go to Europe. The rest goes to the US.

The majority of the traffic to the US refuels at the Galapagos Islands before continuing to Mexico or Panama, carving through the water at speeds of up to 70mph, or in semi-submersible vessels that are nearly impossible to detect with radar.

In recent years, as global cocaine production has increased — it rose by 34 per cent between 2022 and 2023, according to the UN — so has the use of the Galapagos route.

Captain Francisco Ayala, spokesman for the Ecuadorian coastguard, said: “It’s a big challenge, but we’re really trying to close the doors, to narrow down where they can operate. We’re closing them down, but of course, they’re also adapting to the changes.”

Captain Francisco Ayala

MIGUEL FERNÁNDEZ FLORES

A source in the port city of Guayaquil who has worked with the drug smuggling gangs said uninhabited islands were also used to store drugs on the route north. Last month, the Ecuadorian navy found more than 1,300 packages of cocaine, each weighing around a kilo, on a remote outcrop in the Galapagos.

“The Galapagos Islands are like a warehouse,” said a source working with the drug smuggling gang. “They’ve created storage areas there. They stash the drugs there and they also receive the shipments there.”

When the young naturalist Charles Darwin landed on the shores of the Galapagos on the HMS Beagle in 1835, the bills of the finches and the shells of the giant tortoises helped him work towards his theory of evolution. Efforts to safeguard the islands’ biodiversity have grown over the decades: in 1959, 97 per cent of the Galapagos were declared a national park, and in 1978, the islands became a Unesco world heritage site.

The Ecuadorian Navy seized 1,300 packages of cocaine during a November raid

ECUADORIAN NAVY

Santa Cruz Island’s coastline in the Galapagos

However, the environmental legislation that is designed to protect the Galapagos made Diego and his colleagues vulnerable to the offers from the cartels, he has claimed. To preserve marine life, almost all fishing with anything other than a hook is banned, and he claimed that fishermen cannot make enough to survive as a result.

“[The government] don’t give you the option to work,” he said. “And everyone has to support their family. Unfortunately [fuel smuggling] is an easy job.”

Fishermen receive a fuel subsidy, designed to boost their livelihoods, but it has allowed them to make huge profits from selling their supply to traffickers. The government said the fishermen’s fuel consumption was strictly monitored and their boats were fitted with GPS.

At least a quarter of the fishermen were involved in trafficking fuel to narcos, according to two officials, who asked not to be identified. The naval intelligence source estimated it was 65 per cent.

“There are fishermen who literally dedicate themselves to smuggling fuel, to sell to illicit fuel economies. And they live from that,” Diego said. “They don’t fish anymore. And unfortunately, the state has not yet taken this issue seriously.”

The Ecuadorian Coast Guard team carries out an inspect of a fishing boat

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES

The US is taking it very seriously. In the Caribbean and parts of the Pacific, the Trump administration has been bombing speedboats that it claimed were delivering drugs.

However, efforts to shut down the drug routes from Ecuador have foundered. A plan to open an American base in the Galapagos and in Manta, on the coast of Ecuador, which supporters have said would provide US intelligence with oversight to fight the drug trade, was rejected by voters in Ecuador in a referendum last month.

Drugs, weapons and mobile phones seized in an operation by police in 2024

GERARDO MENOSCAL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

In the Galapagos, many refuse to speak about the role of the narcotic trafficking gangs and the social problems, including widespread corruption, they’ve tapped into.

“The thing is, if tourists knew what was happening they would go somewhere else,” a senior official said. “So the people in charge here hide the reality of what’s happening.

“The Galapagos is the jewel of Ecuadorian tourism. If the world knew what was really happening, they’d want to change it and make it better. But the people in charge here don’t. Because they’re all involved, and it doesn’t suit them to change.”

Additional reporting: Arturo Torres, Miguel Fernández Flores