Ecuador, once a relatively nonviolent neighbor of Colombia and Peru’s major cocaine makers, has become a battleground for criminal gangs seeking drug trafficking, according to analysts and authorities.
Violence is sinister and takes many forms: car bombs, massacres in prisons and bodies hanging from bridges are commonplace. Decapitated heads are in the streets.
The South American country of 18 million people, which for years was just a transit point for drug trafficking, has a “sanctuary for organized crime,” former army intelligence chief Mario Pazmiño told AFP.
“The explosions and murders we see are messages of terror to tell us that they, not the police, are a strategic area,” he added.
In 2020, Ecuador ranked third among Colombia and the United States in terms of the amount of cocaine seized, with 6. 5% of the global total, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Hundreds of tons of cocaine leave its ports each year for distribution around the world, most of it heading to the United States and Belgium.
In a 2019 report, Ecuador’s intelligence facilities said there were at least 26 criminal gangs fighting for the lucrative market, but authorities now say that number could have increased. Many of those criminal teams work with Mexican cartels.
And as drug trafficking intensifies, so does crime.
Ecuador’s homicide rate in 2021 14 is consistent with 100,000 inhabitants, nearly double that of last year, according to the Interior Ministry.
To know how drug trafficking mutated in Ecuador, you have to go back to the early 2000s.
“During those years, Ecuador has initiated a deceptive crusade to eliminate coca plantations,” Pazmiño explained.
The coca leaf is the element used to make cocaine.
But as in other countries, the initiative failed: each and every time the government destroyed crops, producers simply moved to a new domain and started over.
A decade later, Ecuador has even recorded a record number of coca plantations.
The failure of the anti-drug policy encouraged Mexican cartels such as Sinaloa, Clan del Golfo and Los Zetas to settle in Ecuador, as they had already done in Colombia.
Ecuador’s dollarized economy has facilitated the cocaine trade, allowing for the simple laundering of money from profits, while weak establishments and teams of criminals willing to cooperate have created a better opportunity for the coins involved.
At the origin of the Mexican infiltration Jorge Luis Zambrano, known as “Rasquina” and leader of the Los Choneros gang, according to former criminal director Alexandra Zumárraga.
In 2010, Zambrano presented coverage to the Sinaloa cartel, which broke into the strategically coastal province of Manabí.
There were also “members of the Latin Kings and Netas gangs. . . who have turned to drug trafficking,” said a human rights activist who works with youth teams and requested anonymity because of death threats.
For Martha Macías, former director of guayaquil’s largest prison, “today’s drug traffickers are the grandchildren of the Latin Kings and Netas who operated in Quito and Guayaquil, and in robberies and contract murders. “
The criminal passage through Macías is where most of the massacres of criminals have occurred since February 2021, with a balance of only 400 inmates killed. In an incident last year, Ecuador declared a state of emergency in the criminal formula following a war between gang members and a coastal criminal that killed at least 116 people.
Authorities said at least of the dead were beheaded.
Rival drug cartels operate from internal criminal walls, meaning their turf wars can take internal positions.
Until his murder in 2020, Zambrano, the leader of Ecuadorian criminal gangs, which the government said had up to 25,000 members, in a country with only 50,000 police.
His murder sparked a war of leaders inside and outside prisons.
With the proliferation of organized crime, some gangs, such as Los Lobos and Los Tiguerones, have become microcartels.
“They saw an opportunity, bought medicines and processed them in the country, and then exported them,” Pazmiño said.
Both gangs work with Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation cartel and have been involved in riots by fatal criminals. The Ministry of Justice considers the Jalisco cartel to be “one of the five most damaging transnational criminal organizations in the world. “
Since the beginning of 2021, some three hundred tons of drugs have been seized in Ecuador, Interior Minister Patricio Carrillo said.
But the government is struggling to keep up with the cartels’ business development.
It seizes less than 30 percent of the drugs transiting Ecuadorian ports and airports, despite a record 210 tons seized last year.
“About 700 of cocaine a year enter Ecuador from neighboring countries” of Colombia and Peru, Pazmiño said.