With his vintage wardrobe and old-school charm, Colin Armstrong, a businessman and Britain’s former honorary consul in Guayaquil, Ecuador, might have stepped out of a 1960s Bond film. The mustache is slim and closely trimmed above the lip. His impeccably crisp diction could slice mango.
His genteel civility is at odds these days with Ecuador’s brutal landscape. In the early hours of Saturday, December 16, 2023, his life was violently upended when gun-toting kidnappers broke into his weekend home, a 4,000-acre cattle ranch an hour outside the city of Guayaquil on the Pacific coast. “There can be nothing scarier than to wake up with armed men in your bedroom,” says Armstrong, 79.
He had spent much of the previous day on the ranch riding Leopoldo, a grey quarter horse — his favorite. He and his 30-year-old Colombian girlfriend, Katherine Paola Santos, had hosted a dinner party for friends, retiring to bed at 1am. Snoopy, the beagle, who slept on the bed, raised the alarm with his barking.
“I could see several figures in the dark,” Armstrong says. “They grabbed us, so I tried to hit one of them, but what strength do I have?” The intruders put plastic ties around his wrists — “the sort you put on your luggage, it hurt like hell,” he says.
He was naked so they wrapped him in a sheet before dragging him and Santos, in her underwear, downstairs. They asked Armstrong for the keys to his black BMW, shoved the couple inside and drove away, smashing through a locked gate.
It was the start of a terrifying four-day ordeal, a story with an exotic setting and a colorful cast of characters — complete with a gravel-voiced gang leader — that could be straight out of some narco thriller.
The kidnapping put the former consul, who had retired from the post in 2016, and Kate, as he calls his younger companion, under an intense media spotlight.
Armstrong’s relationship with Kate — and their five-decade age gap — had already raised eyebrows in his social circle. Now social media began to buzz with unfounded rumors that she was somehow involved in the abduction. She has denied it and Ecuadorian investigators found no evidence to suggest a link between her and the 15 armed men who, disguised as policemen, came for them that morning.
“God knows why they needed so many,” Armstrong says, speaking in his first interview since the kidnapping. “It’s not as if I had guards or defenses at the ranch — anybody could have walked in.”
The banana-producing country was once considered a haven of peace in a volatile region, and tourists still come to see the Andes and to retrace Darwin’s route through the Galapagos islands. But now it has become a killing field for a plethora of armed gangs fighting for control of lucrative cocaine trafficking routes into Europe, some of which have forged links with more powerful cartels from abroad. With the state struggling to maintain even an illusion of control, the gangs also engage in extortion and kidnapping. Armstrong, a tall, suave, well-off opera lover from Yorkshire, was an obvious target.
He grew up at the 500-acre Tupgill Park , overlooking the Coverdale valley in North Yorkshire. The estate has been in his family for generations and he still owns it. He helped develop its whimsical Forbidden Corner garden: a labyrinth of tunnels, chambers and follies that is open to the public and attracts 100,000 visitors a year.
Educated at Rossall School in Lancashire, he arrived in Ecuador 50 years ago, having decided not to take over the family business — “I didn’t want to be a racehorse trainer.” Instead he got a job with ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries), which sent him to Latin America. He has never looked back. He was seconded by ICI to a company called Agripac, which, years later, he ended up buying. It is now one of the biggest companies in Ecuador, selling agricultural supplies such as fertilizer and animal feed from its headquarters in Guayaquil, a sweltering business hub on a broad, coffee-colored river that bears clumps of water hyacinths in its current.
“People had warned me many times not to follow the same route to work each day or to the ranch at weekends — and to use an armored vehicle with an escort,” Armstrong tells me in his huge, book-lined office in Guayaquil. “But I always laughed off the threat of kidnap. Then it happened.”
He fell for Kate, a pole-dancing fitness fanatic, in 2013. “It was love at first sight,” he says, describing how she came to his office to audition for a role in the company’s calendar, requiring a different pose for each month, sometimes as a “cowgirl”.
From a poor Colombian family, she had arrived in Ecuador aged 15 with a 40-year-old dentist, for whom she had worked as an assistant until branching into modeling. “The best thing about her was that, unlike other models who auditioned for the job, she always smiled,” Armstrong says. “And she didn’t complain when told she’d have to be photographed on a horse.”
They began an affair, causing a rift with Cecilia, his Ecuadorian wife of 50 years, their son, Nick, and two daughters, Alex and Diana. Divorce has never occurred to him, however. “I still love my wife,” he says.
Eccentric and self-effacing, he readily admits to dyeing his hair: “I’m trying to recapture my youth,” he says with a grin — the same response he gives when asked about the age difference with Kate.
The kidnapping, it seems, has only deepened the divide with the family, who have refused to discuss it in public. Talking about it is difficult for Armstrong too. At one point his voice cracks. “Sorry, it’s all still a bit raw,” he says, placing a hand over his eyes, before continuing his narrative.
The gunmen drove for hours through the countryside, switching cars several times to avoid being tracked. Eventually they came to a remote farm. The couple were shoved into a room with several mattresses on the floor and furniture blocking the window.
“They cut the tags off my wrists,” Armstrong recalls. “My arms were black and twice their size, quite horrid.” They asked if the couple had microchips in their bodies. “People have them inserted so that they can be tracked in case of kidnap,” Armstrong says. “We said no but we were terrified they’d produce a razor to find out.”
Another worry was that the kidnappers might slice off fingers or ears to send to his family — who live mostly in Ecuador, apart from two sisters in Yorkshire and Ireland and a daughter in Los Angeles — as a grim inducement to pay a ransom. “Just a week before there had been a kidnap case in which they took three of the victim’s fingers. I couldn’t stop thinking of all the unpleasant things they might do to me.”
One of his captors told him they were the Tiguerones, or Big Tigers. It was alarming news: the gang have a reputation for killing as indifferently as a chef chops vegetables.
“It’s No Country for Amateurs”
I am offered a fascinating insight into the world of Ecuador’s gangs when I am introduced in a hotel meeting room to a man in an orange baseball cap and white shorts, his leg nervously bouncing up and down. A member of one of the main gangs of Guayaquil, the Choneros, he is leading a dangerous double life, working as an informant for the police.
“Kidnapping is just a sideline,” he explains, with a wave of his hand. Control of drug trafficking routes through the big ports is the main game. “This city today is like a magnet for [crime] organizations from all over the world. It’s getting very violent — there are Albanians, the Russian mafia, Italians too. It’s no country for amateurs.”
Ecuador’s unravelling has its roots in turmoil beyond its borders. In 2016 neighboring Colombia’s peace accord with the Farc guerrillas ended a decades-long conflict but also fractured a criminal ecosystem. Former rebels splintered into smaller armed groups, pushing cocaine production deeper into border areas and across the frontier into Ecuador.
The slow collapse of Mexico’s once-dominant Sinaloa cartel, meanwhile, left a power vacuum in the region’s drug trade. Into that space surged a patchwork of smaller, more volatile Ecuadorian groups.
Some are acting as local enforcers and partners for the more powerful criminal organizations from abroad, which are attracted to Ecuador for its lax financial oversight, dollarized economy and ports. The gang member in the hotel tells me that he has even heard news of a Chinese crime group trying to seize a slice of the market.
Police have lost control of swathes of territory. By the early 2020s violence had escalated in Ecuador. Then came the jolts that captured the world’s attention.
In August 2023 the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, a fierce critic of the cartels, was assassinated while out campaigning. Prisons became battlegrounds where rival gangs fought for dominance with shocking brutality. Dismemberments, beheadings and massacres in jails were filmed and shared online. In January 2024 President Daniel Noboa — re-elected last month — declared a state of emergency, deploying the army on the streets. The murder rate fell abruptly, but it has shot up again in early 2025. The country now has the highest murder rate in Latin America — with nearly twice as many killings as Mexico.
General Pablo Dávila, Guayaquil’s police chief, sits in a camouflage jacket looking over the city’s latest crime statistics. “Fatales, Águilas, Mafia 18, Latin Kings, Freddy Kruegers, Chone Killers,” he says, reading out a list of gangs he says are responsible for “the big jump in killing this year”. The Fatales, he notes, are particularly nasty. They decapitate their victims then rip out their hearts. Heads are sent to girlfriends or wives. Hearts are deposited on the doorsteps of the parents. TikTok has become a stage for their brutality.
“I fear we’ll end up like Haiti,” says Lieutenant Colonel Roberto Santamaria, another police official, referring to the Caribbean country where gangs have taken control of entire regions.
Dressed to Kill
Armstrong had been going out with Kate for three years when, in 2016, he stepped down as honorary consul. “It was quietly suggested to me it might be time to move on.” The ambassador in Quito, the capital, picked Armstrong’s son Nick to replace him. Armstrong had fulfilled the role for 35 years, identifying dead Britons — “not a nice thing to have to do” — and visiting British detainees in prison: “We’d take them turkey dinners at Christmas.”
Along the way he met a few British royals — Charles, Camilla, Andrew and Anne. The city’s hottest social ticket was the annual party hosted by Armstrong at his Rodeo Grande ranch to mark the Queen’s birthday each year for as many as 500 guests.
“They were lovely events. We’d have a piper,” he says, his eyes misting over. Nowadays, he complains, the Foreign Office is “a shadow of what it used to be”. The ambassador lives in a flat in Quito, the capital, rather than the “huge residence” of yesteryear. “In Quito they had to do the Queen’s birthday in a hotel,” he adds. Not only that. On a visit to Britain once, he had dropped in on his favorite former Ecuador envoy: “I found him washing his own car,” he says with a hint of disapproval.
I bring him back to the kidnapping.
It seemed to Armstrong that his abductors had not planned to take his girlfriend prisoner: she had insisted on going with him, saying, “He’s an old man, I need to look after him or he’ll die.” He adds: “She’s a bit like my nurse.” The scuffle at the ranch had caused a cut on the “brittle skin” of his arm. Kate had told the men he needed hydrogen peroxide cream on the wound to prevent it becoming infected.
The next day the gunmen brought Kate a military-style jacket with lots of pockets and asked her to put it on. They said it was stuffed with explosives. The flashing red light was a detonator. Her job was to deliver a phone to Armstrong’s son, Nick, who should answer it when they called him. “They said, ‘If you go anywhere near a police station we will know, and we’ll detonate the vest,’ ” Armstrong recalls. The kidnappers drove her to the edge of Guayaquil, where they gave her $20 to get a taxi to Nick’s house.
The explosive jacket seems to have been a fake. After reaching Nick’s gated compound to hand over the phone, police explosives experts were summoned. “One came up to me holding out a pair of scissors and told me to cut one of the wires,” she says. “He then ran away.”
When she cut the wire, the red light stopped flashing. She delivered the phone as instructed. After a police interrogation she went home to her flat, where she was reunited with her mother.
“I was really scared and sad. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I was taken away, leaving you there,” she says to Armstrong when we meet at the couple’s house. “I couldn’t do anything except think of you, praying you were still alive. That gave me hope to carry on. I took a lot of sleeping pills to try to relax.”
After many hours Armstrong was awoken. His captors handed him a phone, telling him to tell Nick, on the other end, to pay $5 million in cash. “We’ve got to pay,” Armstrong told his son. “And Nick replied, ‘Yes, Dad, I’ll do it. Don’t worry, I’ll get you out,’ ” Armstrong recalls.
Nick, who has a senior position at Agripac, had learnt about his father being snatched within minutes of it happening. One of the dinner guests had stayed the night at the ranch and witnessed the kidnapping — he was hit on the head when he tried to intervene. He called Nick as the abductors drove off. Nick alerted the embassy in Quito, which notified David Cameron, the foreign secretary at the time, who told Rishi Sunak, then prime minister.
Sunak had once visited Armstrong’s British estate with its Forbidden Corner, in his North Yorkshire constituency. Sunak phoned President Noboa, 37, once the world’s youngest elected head of state, and urged him to do everything he could.
Armstrong, meanwhile, had been given a pair of filthy old shorts to wear: “Otherwise I would have been in the altogether.” Farm workers coerced by the kidnap gang would occasionally bring him pieces of coconut to eat. “One said, ‘We’ve nothing against you but we daren’t let you go.’ ” Even so, he considered running. But if he managed to get past the guards he would not get far, he reasoned, without shoes and only in shorts.
The gunmen brought in the phone again. “This time it was a rather unfortunate call,” Armstrong says. A rough-voiced leader of the Tiguerones gang told him bluntly: “I’ve given the order to have you killed.”
Armstrong panicked. “I said, ‘Why? What have I done?’ ” The gangster replied that nine members of his group had been arrested in Guayaquil and that the “son of a bitch” president was vowing to destroy their network. It turned out that, despite the gang’s efforts to avoid being tracked, one of its members had carried off Armstrong’s phone, allowing police to follow him to a hideout in Guayaquil, where he and eight others were arrested. “That seems quite amateurish in retrospect,” Armstrong says.
Two of those arrested were subsequently murdered in prison — presumably by rival gangs. One died of natural causes. Three were sentenced to 17 years in prison. Three were released for lack of evidence.
Armstrong was suddenly and inexplicably “full of bravado”. “What do you gain from killing me?” he told the gangster down the phone. “Instead of getting any money, the charge against you is murder.”
Immediately he regretted it. His hands started shaking. “I thought, ‘What have I done? How stupid, because a big boy in the Tiguerones — how many murders has he already got to his name? One more will not make a bit of difference.’ Then I started to worry. Because every time I heard the chain rattling on the door, I thought, ‘Well, this is it. A sicario has come with his gun or knife or whatever they’ll use.”
Diplomat’s Ransom
In The Honorary Consul, Graham Greene’s 1973 novel, the aging British consul in a small town in Argentina is kidnapped by revolutionaries who mistake him for the American ambassador. Freed at the end of the story, he marries his girlfriend, a 20-year-old local he met in a brothel. Happily, Armstrong too was released in the end.
Having understood that Ecuador was descending into lawlessness, he had taken out kidnap and ransom (K&R) insurance. This was de rigueur in the 1990s and 2000s for wealthy Colombians and Mexicans, and is now considered essential in Ecuador: no Guayaquil magnate is without it.
Two hostage negotiation experts from an internationally known security company helped Nick to negotiate the ransom down to a tiny fraction of the $5 million the gang had initially demanded. It appears that the involvement of President Noboa helped: police upgraded the investigation from kidnap to terrorism, allowing Nick to tell the Tiguerones that Agripac’s bank accounts had been frozen and that he could not pay them anything. “The amount came down tremendously and was settled for five figures, not seven,” Armstrong says, declining to specify the amount.
The kidnappers, realizing they were not going to get close to what they wanted from Nick, began to pin their hopes on a payout directly from Armstrong. At one point they asked him how much cash he kept in his safe. He explained that he had debts and creditors but not much actual money. He added, however, that he could arrange to get cash from sales at his Agripac shops around the country, which amounted to about $100,000 a day. But in order to do that they would have to let him go.
“They said, ‘OK, if you give us $500,000 a week over a month, we’ll reduce the amount from $5 million to $2 million.”
Perhaps believing the old adage about an Englishman and his word, they asked him several times, “Do you promise?” Armstrong said he did. “So they are rather innocent, these people,” he grins. Then he got a call from gravel voice: “You’ve made a promise to pay us $2 million. So I will let you out.”
The following evening two gunmen bundled him into the back of a car and dumped him by a roadside near a brothel, with a last reminder to keep his promise. A police car picked him up two hours later after the gang gave them the location. He was taken to see a doctor. “Apart from my arms I was in pretty good shape,” he says.
His wife and daughters were at the front door of the Guayaquil family home to meet him at 4am on December 20, four days after he was seized. Nick, who had barely slept for three days, had gone to bed after hearing his father was free. “We all cried and hugged each other… I badly needed a glass of wine,” Armstrong says. “We opened a bottle and I told them my story.”
The family were together for Christmas, too, in Yorkshire: there, Armstrong faced bitter recriminations over his relationship with Kate. He was told to make a choice. If he did not leave her, he should move out of the family home in Guayaquil. He chose Kate.
The couple went on a trip of a lifetime that included wine tasting in South Africa, visiting mountain gorillas in Rwanda, a journey to the South Pole, a helicopter ride up Everest and a geisha ceremony in Japan. They now live in a new, safer home within a gated community on the outskirts of Guayaquil with 24-hour security. Snoopy, the beagle, waits by the door. Armstrong calls for champagne in quaintly accented Spanish as Kate, a tall figure in white trousers and crop top, descends a sweeping marble staircase like a diva from one of his favorite operas.
On a tan sofa in front of a giant TV she describes the hurt she felt over being labelled a conspirator in the kidnapping. “People were cruel. I felt very sad that they could make jokes and lie about us at such a terrible time,” she says.
Armstrong, meanwhile, has chronicled the abduction in Kidnap, which is on sale now in the Forbidden Corner’s gift shop. Life in Ecuador, though, will never be the same.
When Armstrong discovered Nick had already paid a ransom, he decided there was no need to pay the gang anything more. Facial recognition technology has been installed on the doors of his office in Guayaquil. He goes everywhere in an armor-plated 4×4 accompanied by bodyguards, as do his nearest and dearest.
“Kate quite likes it,” he chuckles. “When she goes shopping they carry her bags.”
He has had to sell his beloved ranch. “They told me it was no longer safe to visit. So I could no longer ride Leopoldo, my horse, who has since died. The new owner has sold the 1,000 cattle and cut down my beautiful flowering trees.” He sighs: “The Ecuador where I have lived and worked for 53 years has vanished. It’s a paradise lost.”
Matthew Campbell is a roving correspondent who, in more than 30 years at The Sunday Times of London, has covered numerous wars, natural disasters, and major political stories while serving as the paper’s bureau chief in Moscow in the early 1990s and, later, in Washington, D.C., and Paris
