Albanian mafia boss, drug lord who stirred up Ecuadorian politics, arrested in Dubai

The leader of the Albanian drug trafficking gang in Ecuador, Dritan Gjika, is arrested in Dubai. 

The news was announced by the Ecuadorian Interior Ministry in a post on X, which states that Gjika's arrest was made during an international operation conducted today (May 26).

He was internationally wanted by Interpol for drug trafficking, money laundering and organized crime.

Who is Dritan Gjika?

Gjika became one of the most prominent Albanian drug traffickers in Ecuador in recent years, and a large part of his network has now come to light.

Gjika first went to Ecuador in November 2009, when he was 33 years old. In 2013, he was granted citizenship and settled in Guayaquil, the economic heart of Ecuador. There he began to build his drug trafficking empire. He was one of the first Albanian traffickers to set up shop in Ecuador, posing as a businessman.

Gjika and another Albanian bought an export company called “Cresmark SA” in 2014, and Gjika was appointed general manager. That same year, he opened a construction company with Ecuadorian businessman Rubén Cherres.

Cherres was no stranger to law enforcement. In 1999, he was arrested on drug trafficking charges after a police raid led to the seizure of 108 bags of cocaine. He was acquitted the following year after several influential figures testified in favor of his release, including Danilo Carrera, brother-in-law of Ecuador's then-president, Guillermo Lasso.

In addition to his ties to politics, Cherres was also well-connected to Ecuador's business and political elites, making him a powerful ally for Gjika's drug trafficking scheme.

Although it is unclear exactly when Gjika began trafficking cocaine to Europe, it is clear that he was in the right place when in neighboring Colombia, the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC) signed a historic peace agreement in 2016. When the FARC demobilized in 2017, the dissidents of the FARC’s 48th Front kept their weapons and territory on the Colombia-Ecuador border. Lacking contacts with international buyers, they formed an alliance with “Constru”, a drug trafficking network that dominated the routes to Sucumbíos, a province in Ecuador. “Constru” connected the remnants of the FARC with international buyers, many of them from the Balkans, including Gjika.

According to Ecuadorian and Spanish police, Gjika’s organization initially trafficked cocaine in packages weighing hundreds of kilograms in containers belonging to Gjika’s company or other affiliated companies. In 2018, Gjika apparently tried to expand his business. He bought shares in a second export company, Agricomtrade, which shipped bananas to various European companies.
One of them, Albanian importer Alba Exotic Fruit, was used to import cocaine into Albania, according to Albanian prosecutors. In total, Agricomtrade sent more than 150 shipments through Alba Exotic Fruit.

Gjika is suspected of working with several coordinators who oversaw the establishment of companies and the recruitment of public officials.

According to Spanish police reports, the organization sourced its cocaine from a supplier in Colombia, who delivered 4 tons of the drug each month to storage centers in Ecuador. Payments for cocaine shipments were deposited using bank accounts belonging to a member of Gjika’s network, according to Ecuadorian prosecutors. Once the cocaine arrived in Ecuador, Ecuadorian subcontractors handled the storage and transportation. Gjika’s organization paid these subcontractors in cocaine.

In a single day in June 2021, Gjika and Cherres founded 8 companies, mostly in the construction sector. Since then, 6 of them have been under investigation for money laundering. Between 2015 and 2024, the organization laundered at least $31 million through these companies and others, according to Ecuador's public prosecutor.

However, in mid-2021, Ecuador's anti-narcotics police launched an investigation that identified Gjika as the head of a cocaine trafficking scheme involving Cherres and other Ecuadorian businessmen. Gjika came under increasing scrutiny in early 2023, when a slew of media reports implicated him in a high-level corruption scheme.