How did Ecuador become one of the most violent countries in Latin America?

Until a few years ago, Ecuador was an island of peace between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest producers of cocaine. But since 2018, at the rate of the seizures of drughomicides increase with the signature of transnational organized crime.

The shooting murder of Presidential candidate in the center Fernando Villavicencio, second in the intention to vote, shocked the country on Wednesday. Six Colombians were detained by the crime and a seventh died in a confrontation with police.

The assassination took place on the eve of the early general elections on August 20 in Ecuadorwhere violence linked to drug trafficking shot up the homicide rate to a record of 26 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, almost double that of the previous year.

President Guillermo Lasso, at war against the drug trafficking unable to stop the violence, he accused “organized crime” of the murder of the former journalist who denounced millionaire cases of corruption and who had received death threats from the Los Choneros narco gang.

The Minister of the Interior, Juan Zapata, has indicated that more than 13 criminal organizations operate in Ecuadoramong them Los Choneros, the oldest and most powerful, now allied with the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel.

But military intelligence reports up to 26 gangs linked to the drug trafficking.

Los Choneros’ most important rival, Los Lobos, is associated with the Mexican cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación.

Experts consulted by AFP explain that the war against drugs in Mexico and Colombia led cartels from these two countries and Albanian mafias to settle in Ecuador.

For him drug trafficking The strategic ports on the Pacific are key, the point of departure for cocaine to Europe and the United States.

They were also attracted by the country’s porous borders, a dollarized economy, state corruption and a lack of control over money laundering, specialists say.

blow for blow

For Jorge Restrepo, director of the Colombian studies center Cerac, the cartels operate in Ecuador“at a lower production cost” because they are infiltrated in state organs.

“There is a problem in Ecuador that Colombia does not have today and is that Ecuador has a policy to fight organized crime that has not prevented the public forces and judicial organizations from infiltrating organized crime related to drug trafficking”, he told AFP.

Luis Córdova Alarcón, director of the research program on Order, Conflict and Violence at the state Central University of Ecuadorbelieves that the start of “extreme criminal violence” dates back to the explosion of a car bomb in January 2018.

The unusual attack left a semi-destroyed police station and 23 slightly injured in a border town with Colombia.

The perpetrator was a dissident of the Colombian FARC guerrilla group who murdered three members of a team from the Quito newspaper El Comercio and who died at the hands of Colombian security forces that year.

Among the victims of violence in Ecuador there are also mayors, judges, prosecutors and dozens of civilians without criminal records.

Cocaine seizures are on the rise and in the last three years have exceeded 530 tons.

Experts believe that the increase in seizures and state action in the prisons from which many organized crime bosses operate has only made the problem worse.

“Ecuador it becomes increasingly violent due to the way in which the State intervenes, through its security forces, in the cocaine market by beheading (capturing) ringleaders and increasing cocaine seizures”, pointed out Córdova Alarcón.

The criminals try to defend the drug business and others such as the illegal extraction of gold and arms trafficking, said the specialist.

The orginazed crime “is already taking the state“, he claimed.

“State in ambush”

The car bomb attack was followed by bloody prison massacres due to disputes between drug mafias that left more than 430 prisoners dead in almost three years.

In the style of the Mexican narco, dismembered corpses began to appear on the streets of the country, bodies hung from bridges, and kidnappings for extortion took place in which the captors have cut off their victims’ fingers and ears.

“We have a State ambushed by organized crime, and an economy and a society besieged by the same organized crime.”, another security expert who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals told AFP.

Criminal organizations have the power to challenge the state. “They have intelligence, many resources, high technology, a very high infiltration capacity”, he indicated.

The gangs have tens of thousands of members – as many as the police, which has some 60,000 officers – and even more sophisticated weapons.

With information from AFP