A few days ago, a media outlet consulted my opinion on the effect of the crime boom we are experiencing on tourism and investments. I replied that physical insecurity was part of the problem. That’s obvious. The matter is worse.

Let’s look at the statistics of the Secretariat of the Andean Community regarding tourism and investments.

In the 1990s, turbulent years for Colombia, before Álvaro Uribe came to bring order to the neighboring country, Ecuador was recognized as the “island of peace”. However, the number of foreign tourists who visited Colombia amounted to almost 3% of its population, and Ecuador 3.3%, or practically the same. And foreign investment per capita in Colombia was at least four times that of Ecuador. If we were guided only by indices of physical uncertainty, we would not find an explanation for these realities.

Investments, like tourism, seek security, but not only physical, but also political and legal. In fact, the physical insecurity of Ecuador today is partly the result of decades of political and legal insecurity.

We are surprised by the daily murders, but it is not a scandal that judges legally release criminals, convicted of either robbery, embezzlement, or murder, while any political group takes over the capital, kidnaps the police and the army. , without any judicial body prosecuting them. Our justice system must be among the most corrupt and ineffective on the continent, to the point that there is no more truth in Ecuador, all modesty and every frame of reference has been lost. Black can be white at any time.

It doesn’t hurt that the Assembly has been engaged in fratricidal struggles for power for two years, without adopting the Comprehensive Law on Security, which it has in its hands and others that should be a priority. We should be scarred by the first report prepared by the assemblymen for the impeachment trial, one that would put any intellectually normal being to shame.

The end result is that the Ecuadorian is in a state of complete helplessness. Physically, because the Executive can’t even give us a light at the end of the tunnel about the crime problem, legally, because the justice system doesn’t work, and politically, because its highest institutions are a national disgrace. The citizen is absolutely helpless.

I cannot explain this phenomenon without concluding that it is rooted in the general intellectual and moral impoverishment of our representatives, authorities and institutions. But having concluded this, we have to worry even more, because the political race is nothing but a reflection of the state of civil society. Perhaps the first step to achieving change is to recognize that the country, including its civil society, is an ordinary Ecuadorian, and not just that establishment politically, it is contaminated, with signs of rotting. Hopefully this rot will not reach 50% plus one citizen. At that point there is no cure. Are we there? (OR)