A total of 210 tons of drugs were seized in one year, a record. At least 4,500 murders last year, also a record. Children recruited by gangs. Prisons as hubs for crime. Neighborhoods consumed by criminal feuds. And all this chaos financed by powerful outsiders with deep pockets and extensive experience in the global drug trade.
Ecuador, on the western edge of South America, has become the gold rush state of the drug trade in just a few short years, with major cartels from as far away as Mexico and Albania joining forces with prison and street gangs, creating a wave of unleashing violence unparalleled in the country. recent history.
This unrest is fueled by the growing demand for cocaine in the world. While many policymakers are focused on an epidemic of opioids, such as fentanyl, killing tens of thousands of Americans each year, cocaine production has risen to record levels, a phenomenon now plaguing Ecuadorian society and turning a once-peaceful nation into a battlefield.
“People are consuming abroad,” said Major Edison Núñez, an intelligence officer with the Ecuadorian National Police, “but they don’t understand the consequences that are happening here.”
It’s not that Ecuador is new to the drug trade. Sandwiched between the world’s largest cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru, it has long served as a point of departure for illicit products bound for North America and Europe.
But a boom in Colombia’s cultivation of the coca leaf, a basic ingredient in cocaine, has led to an increase in the drug’s production — while years of lax policing Ecuador’s drug trafficking industry have made the country an increasingly attractive base for production and distribution. of drugs. .
Violence related to drugs began to peak around 2018, as local crime groups began to hunt for better positions in the trade. In the beginning, violence was mostly confined to prisons, where the population had increased sharply following stricter drug sentences and increased use of pretrial detention.
Eventually, the government lost control of its penal system, with inmates forcing other inmates to pay for beds, services, and security, even holding the keys to their own prison blocks. According to experts in Ecuador, penitentiaries quickly became bases for the drug trade.
International organized crime saw a lucrative opportunity to expand its activities. Today, Mexico’s most powerful cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación, are financiers on the ground, along with a group from the Balkans that the police call the Albanian mafia. Local prison and street crime groups with names such as Los Choneros and Los Tiguerones are working with the international groups, coordinating storage, transportation and other activities, police said.
Cocaine, or a precursor called cocabase, enters Ecuador from Colombia and Peru, usually leaving by water from one of the country’s bustling ports.
Of the roughly 300,000 shipping containers that depart each month from one of Ecuador’s most populous cities, Guayaquil, one of South America’s busiest ports, authorities can search only 20 percent, Major Núñez said.
Today, drugs are transported from the ports of Ecuador, hidden in mock floors, in boxes of bananas, in pallets of wood and cocoa, finally landing at parties in American college towns and clubs in European cities.
In Guayaquil, a humid city surrounded by green hills, with a metropolitan population of 3.5 million, the rivalry between criminal groups has spilled onto the streets, spawning a gruesome and public style of violence clearly designed to instill fear. wake up and exercise control.
Television news stations are regularly filled with stories of beheadings, car bombings, police killings, young men hanging from bridges, and children being shot outside their homes or schools.
“It’s so painful,” said a community leader, who declined to be named for security reasons. The leader’s neighborhood has been transformed in recent years, with children as young as 13 being forcibly recruited into criminal groups. “They are under threat,” said the leader. “’Don’t you want to join? We will kill your family.’”
In response, Ecuador’s president, Guillermo Lasso, a conservative, has declared several states of emergency and sent the military into the streets to guard schools and businesses.
More recently, Los Choneros and others have found another source of income: extortion. Retailers, community leaders, even water suppliers, garbage collectors and schools are forced to pay taxes to criminal groups in exchange for their safety.
Extortion has been common in prisons for years.
On a recent morning in Guayaquil, Katarine, 30, a mother of three, sat on a curb outside the country’s largest prison. Her husband, a banana farmer, had been taken into custody five days earlier, she said, after a street fight.
He called her from jail, she said, and asked her to transfer money to a gang bank account. If she didn’t pay, he explained, he would be beaten, possibly electrocuted.
Katarine, who asked to use only her first name for security reasons, eventually sent $263, about a month’s wages, which she earned by pawning her. possessions.
“I was beyond desperate,” she said, asking why authorities weren’t doing more to monitor this practice. Every person thrown in jail, she said, was another taxpayer for the criminal groups.
The violence has traumatized many Ecuadoreans, in part because the shift in the country’s fate has been so dramatic.
Between 2005 and 2015, Ecuador witnessed an extraordinary transformation, as millions of people emerged from poverty, riding the wave of an oil boom whose then president, Rafael Correa, a leftist, poured money into education, health care and other social services. programs.
Suddenly, housekeepers and bricklayers thought their children would finish high school, become professionals, and live very different lives from their parents. Today, those Ecuadoreans see their neighborhoods deteriorating amid crime, drugs, and violence.
The country’s decline was also exacerbated by the pandemic, which, like elsewhere in the world, hit the economy hard. According to government data, only 34 percent of Ecuadoreans are currently employed, up from a high of nearly 50 percent a decade ago.
In some neighborhoods, community leaders say, financial hardship is driving youth into crime, exacerbating the security crisis.
On another morning in Guayaquil, 41-year-old Ana Morales stood in a large cemetery and visited a white crypt containing the remains of her son, Miguel, who hairdresser and father. Ms Morales said when work dried up during the pandemic, he stole a mobile phone to pay for medicine and food, landing him in jail.
That turned out to be a death sentence. While he was there, a riot broke out among prison gangs.
He was one of more than 600 people killed in prison feuds since 2019, according to the Standing Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, a non-profit organization in Guayaquil.
Ms. Morales helped found the Committee of Relatives for Prison Justice, a group that denounces and accuses the Ecuadorian state of violating the human rights of prisoners and calls for extensive reparations.
Her goal is to speak for “the other mothers who are crying, who have stayed home holding their pillows.”
“We are in a terrible crisis,” she said, “both in prisons and out on the streets.”
The crisis has spilled over to the government, where some officials have been accused of being co-opted by criminal groups. Journalists have fled, prosecutors have been killed and human rights activists silenced for investigating or speaking out against crime or corruption.
Mr Lasso’s approval rating is low, according to polls, and in May, when he was charged with corruption charges, he dissolved the National Assembly and called for new elections. Ecuadoreans will elect a new president and National Assembly in August, with a possible runoff in October as the country finds itself at a political crossroads with escalating violence.
In Guayaquil, police have tried to fight crime with night raids in high-violence areas.
On a recent evening, a caravan of police vehicles roared through the Guayaquil suburb of Duran. At half a dozen stops, they stormed out in body armor and black balaclavas, ordered men to the ground and sent children in pajamas screaming into their mothers’ arms.
They made three arrests over several hours, sometimes seizing fist-sized white stones, presumably drugs, from a home.
Back in the car, the officers talked about the challenges they faced.
One officer, who requested anonymity so he could speak freely, said what Ecuador really needed was a leader with a laser-like focus on crime. Among the names he mentioned was that of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who has garnered global attention but has also faced widespread accusations of human rights violations due to his massive prison sentences and declining crime rates.
“We need someone like the guy in El Salvador,” the officer said, explaining that he liked Mr. Bukele “taking the reins of security.”
A lack of money, the officer explained, meant that officers paid out of pocket to repair their vehicles. Instead of radios, they used their own telephones to communicate. Because the criminals have much better technology, he said, “we have an unequal battle.”
Reporting was contributed by Thalíe Ponce in Guayaquil, José María León in Quito and Genevieve Glatsky in Bogotá.
