Until recently, Ecuador was still a haven of peace located between the largest cocaine producers in the world, Colombia and Peru. But since 2018, drug trafficking and homicides, attributed to transnational organized crime groups, have increased considerably there.
This week, centrist presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, the second favorite in the polls, was shot dead during a political rally.
Six Colombians were arrested and a seventh died in an exchange of fire with the police.
The politician’s assassination, which shocked the country, occurred ahead of general elections scheduled for August 20. This former journalist had denounced corruption and received death threats from the Los Choneros trafficking gang.
The drug-related homicide rate of 26 per 100,000 population since the start of the year has almost doubled compared to last year and marks a record.
The victims of violence are mayors, judges, prosecutors and dozens of civilians without criminal records.
President Guillermo Lasso, who fought against gangs but failed to stem crime, accused “organized crime” of having ordered the murder of Mr. Villavicencio.
According to Interior Minister Juan Zapata, more than 13 criminal organizations operate in Ecuador, including Los Choneros, the oldest and most powerful, now allied with Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.
But military intelligence lists up to 26 drug-related gangs. Los Lobos, the main rival gang to Los Choneros, is associated with the Mexican cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación.
Experts, consulted by AFP, explain that the war on drugs in Mexico and Colombia has led cartels from these two countries, in addition to Albanian mafias, to settle in Ecuador, where to benefit from the porosity of the borders. , the “dollarized” economy, state corruption and lack of control over money laundering.
For drug trafficking, the Pacific ports, the starting point for cocaine to Europe and the United States, are strategic.
For Jorge Restrepo, director of the Colombian study center Cerac, the cartels operate in Ecuador “at a lower production cost”.
But, “there is a difficulty in Ecuador that Colombia does not have today, Ecuador is pursuing a policy of combating organized crime which does not prevent law enforcement and judicial organizations from being infiltrated by organized crime linked to drug trafficking,” he explains.
According to Luis Córdova Alarcón, director of the research program on order, conflict and violence at the Central State University of Ecuador, the beginning of “extreme criminal violence” in Ecuador dates back to the explosion of a car bomb in January 2018.
A police station had been partly destroyed in this singular attack which had caused 23 minor injuries in a border town of Colombia.
The author was a Colombian FARC guerrilla dissident who assassinated three members of the Quito newspaper El Comercio, before dying at the hands of Colombian security forces that same year.
“Ecuador is becoming increasingly violent due to the way the state intervenes, through its security forces, in the cocaine market by bringing down leaders and increasing cocaine seizures,” says Córdova Alarcón.
Cocaine seizures, over 530 tonnes over the past three years, are on the rise.
Criminal organizations defend their interests, including the trafficking of drugs, arms and gold, explained the specialist. Organized crime “is already attacking the state,” he said.
Beginning with the car bombing, a settling of scores occurred in prisons, leaving more than 430 people dead in nearly three years.
Reminiscent of the methods of Mexican narcos, dismembered corpses began to appear in the streets of the country, bodies hanging from bridges and kidnappings for extortion multiplied, leaving in the best of cases, the victims amputated of a finger or with one ear.
“Organized crime is ambushing the state, besieging the economy and society,” another expert told AFP, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Criminal gangs challenge the state, he said. “They have intelligence, a lot of resources, advanced technologies, a very high infiltration capacity.”
08/13/2023 05:27:09 – Quito (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
