On May 27, 2023, police at the port of Guayaquil in Ecuador opened a shipping container.

The paperwork said it held canned tuna in sunflower oil. Inside, police found about 1,444 kilograms of cocaine packed in black bags. That's more than 3,000 pounds.

The exporter on the shipping papers was a seafood company in Manta, the center of Ecuador's tuna industry. According to federal prosecutors in New York, it was owned by one of the most powerful families in town.

Jaime Estrada Bonilla, 71, is a former mayor of Manta who also ran the city's port authority. His son, Jaime Estrada Medranda, 41, represented the surrounding province in Ecuador's National Assembly.

On Thursday, federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment charging the father, the son and three other men with conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the United States and with machine gun offenses. If convicted, they face life in prison.

Prosecutors say the network operated for more than a decade. The cocaine started in Colombia and Peru, much of it from armed groups in the Colombian jungle. It moved through Ecuador, up through Mexico, across Texas and other southwest border states, into New York, and on to Europe.

According to the indictment, the Estradas' business was renting out their containers. Traffickers placed an ordinary seafood order through the company, the cocaine went into the container with the tuna, and the container went onto a ship. The Estradas charged by the kilo, or a lump sum of several hundred thousand dollars per shipment. Prosecutors say the money was paid in cash at the family's homes or in hotel rooms.

The son allegedly tried to keep his hands clean. Prosecutors say he avoided meeting traffickers in person because of his political ambitions, and he let trusted middlemen handle the meetings and the money.

That caution didn't hold up this year.

From March to August 2026, prosecutors say, the group negotiated a deal to move about two tons of cocaine through Mexico with the United States as the target market. After a $10,000 advance came in, Estrada Medranda allegedly approved the deal himself on a video call.

The middleman on that deal was Jacobo Abdala Bucaram-Pulley, 48, the son of former Ecuadorian President Abdalá Bucaram. Prosecutors call him a drug and firearms trafficker who had worked with the Estradas before.

Two Manta fishing-industry men, Geovanny Fernández Menéndez and William José Briones López, allegedly handled the day-to-day work. They met traffickers, collected payments, and received and packed the drugs.

The network had protection. Prosecutors say the Estradas had ties to the leaders of Los Choneros and Los Lobos, two Ecuadorian cartels the Trump administration has designated as foreign terrorist organizations. Los Choneros allegedly supplied armed guards for the drug operations in Manta.

"Ecuador sits at the heart of the global cocaine trade," said Jamie McDonald, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He said the defendants helped make the country "a major transit hub for 70 percent of the cocaine reaching the United States and Europe."

The Estradas were arrested on November 2 while traveling in Panama. Two days later, Ecuadorian police arrested Bucaram-Pulley, Fernández and Briones in Guayaquil.

Ecuador's interior minister, John Reimberg, said Friday that extradition to the United States "can last a few more weeks."

The father and son also own a professional soccer club in Ecuador. Prosecutors say they owned the containers too.