Ecuador | In the land of drug cartels

(Guayaquil, Ecuador) A total of 210 tons of drugs seized in a single year, a record. At least 4,500 murders last year, also a record. Children recruited by gangs. Prisons that become hubs of crime. Neighborhoods plagued by criminal disputes. And all this chaos financed by powerful foreigners with deep pockets and considerable experience in the global drug trade.

Ecuador, located at the western end of South America, has become in a few years the state of the gold rush of drug trafficking, the big cartels from Mexico, even Albania s allying with prison and street gangs, triggering a wave of violence unprecedented in the recent history of the country.

The growing global demand for cocaine is fueling this unrest. As many policy makers focus on the epidemic of opioids, such as fentanyl, which kills tens of thousands of Americans every year, cocaine production has reached record levels, a phenomenon that is now ravaging society. Ecuadorian, turning a once peaceful nation into a battlefield.

“People are consuming abroad,” explains Major Edison Núñez, head of intelligence in the Ecuadorian National Police, “but they don’t understand the consequences that are happening here.”

This is not Ecuador’s first attempt in the field of drugs. Wedged between Colombia and Peru, the world’s largest cocaine producers, it has long served as an exit point for illicit products bound for North America and Europe.

But the rise of coca leaf cultivation in Colombia, the basic ingredient of cocaine, has caused the production of this drug to explode, while years of lax police enforcement in Ecuador’s drug trafficking sector have made the country a base. increasingly attractive for the manufacture and distribution of narcotics.

Drug-related violence began to skyrocket around 2018, as local criminal groups competed for the top positions in the trade. At first, the violence was mainly confined to prisons, whose population had increased following the toughening of drug-related sentences and the increased use of pre-trial detention.

Eventually, the government lost control of its penal system, with prisoners coercing other prisoners to pay for beds, utilities, and security, and even holding the keys to their own prison blocks.

According to experts in Ecuador, penitentiaries quickly became bases of operation for drug trafficking.

International organized crime saw this as a lucrative opportunity to expand its activities. Today, Mexico’s most powerful cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación, are financiers on the ground, as is a Balkan group that police call the Albanian Mafia. According to police, local jails and street crime groups, such as Los Choneros and Los Tiguerones, work with the international groups, coordinating storage, transportation and other activities.

Climate of fear and violence

Cocaine, or a precursor called cocaine paste, enters Ecuador from Colombia and Peru and then usually leaves the country by sea from one of the busiest ports in the country.

Of the roughly 300,000 shipping containers leaving Guayaquil, one of Ecuador’s most populous cities and one of South America’s busiest ports, each month, authorities can only search 20% of among themselves, explained Mr. Núñez.

Today, the drug is transported from Ecuadorian ports, hidden in rebuilt floors, in banana crates, in wooden and cocoa pallets, before landing in parties in American college towns and clubs in European cities.

In Guayaquil, a humid city surrounded by green hills and with a metropolitan population of 3.5 million, rivalries between criminal groups have spilled over into the streets, resulting in a gruesome and public style of violence clearly intended to stir up fear and control.

Television stations regularly broadcast stories of beheadings, car bombs, police killings, young people hanging from bridges and children shot dead outside their homes or schools.

“It’s so painful,” breathed a community leader, who asked not to be identified for security reasons. The leader’s neighborhood has been transformed in recent years, with 13-year-old children forcibly recruited by criminal groups. “They are threatened: ‘You don’t want to join us? We will kill your family,” the leader cited as an example.

In response, Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso, a conservative, declared several states of emergency, sending the army to the streets to monitor schools and businesses.

More recently, Los Choneros and others have found another source of income: extortion. Traders, community leaders and even water suppliers, garbage collectors and schools are forced to pay a tax to criminal groups in exchange for their safety.

In prisons, extortion has been commonplace for years.

On a recent morning in Guayaquil, Katarine, 30, a mother of three, sat on a sidewalk outside the country’s largest prison. Her husband, a banana farmer, had been detained five days earlier, she said, following a street fight.

He called her from jail, she said, asking him to wire money to a gang-owned bank account. If she didn’t pay, he said, he would be beaten or even electrocuted.

Katarine, who for security reasons asked that only her first name be used, ended up sending the equivalent of C$348, or about one month’s salary, which she obtained by pawning her property.

“I was beyond desperate,” she blurted out, wondering why the authorities weren’t doing more to control the practice. Each person thrown in prison is an additional taxpayer for criminal groups, she believes.

The violence has traumatized many Ecuadorians, in part because the country has seen a dramatic change in its circumstances.

An extended crisis

Between 2005 and 2015, Ecuador experienced an extraordinary transformation: millions of people were lifted out of poverty, riding the wave of an oil boom whose profits were invested by the then President, Rafael Correa, a leftist, in education, health care and other social programs.

Suddenly, cleaners and masons believed that their children could graduate from high school, become professionals, and live a totally different life from their parents. Today, these Ecuadorians see their neighborhood deteriorating as a result of crime, drugs and violence.

The country’s decline has also been compounded by the pandemic which, like everywhere else in the world, has hit the economy hard. Today, only 34% of Ecuadorians have adequate jobs, according to government data, compared to nearly 50% 10 years ago.

The crisis has spread to government, where some officials have been accused of being recruited by criminal groups. Journalists have fled, prosecutors have been killed and human rights activists have been silenced for investigating or exposing crime or corruption.

Mr. Lasso’s approval rating is low, according to polls, and in May, facing an indictment for corruption, he dissolved the National Assembly and called new elections. Ecuadorians 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 and violence escalates.

This article was first published in the New York Times.