The group, including two women, were being held, their hands and feet bound, by a gang called Los Lobos – one of Ecuador’s main drug trafficking organisations, President Daniel Noboa’s office said on X.

The captives were mine workers, but authorities did not say if they were being forced to work against their will.

A police source said they had been held hostage for two days until the rescue on Wednesday.

The raid took place in Ecuador’s Andean Azuay province, and officials seized a large quantity of arms and explosives, Noboa’s office said, releasing video footage it said was of the armed rescuers entering an underground chamber of the mine.

The images show dozens of people huddling outside the mine, some clutching rain-protective plastic sheets, surrounded by officers.

Rescuers came under attack from assailants, said the police chief for the region, Jose Vargas.

Two Colombians, presumed members of Los Lobos, were arrested in the operation which also stumbled on buried human remains around the mine site.

‘Internal armed conflict’

Once-peaceful Ecuador is enduring an unprecedented wave of violence linked to drug trafficking.

With ports on the Pacific, the country serves as a transit point for cocaine produced in Colombia and Peru and sent to the US and Europe.

Los Lobos is one of about 20 organisations fighting over trafficking routes.

The country’s prisons have become the nerve centre for the gangs, with more than 460 inmates killed in three years in bloody narco wars.

The January jailbreak of a major drug lord, who is still on the run, led to a spasm of violence that prompted Noboa to declare a state of “internal armed conflict.”

It allowed for military deployment in the streets and prisons.

The homicide rate in Ecuador, a country of about 17 million people, soared from six per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018 to 47 per 100,000 last year.

In the first four months of 2024 alone, about 1,900 homicides were recorded.

For 2023, the number was 8,004.