2023-08-13 20:31:17
Until a few years ago, Ecuador was an island of peace between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest cocaine producers. But since 2018, at the rate of drug seizures, Homicides increase with the signature of transnational organized crime.
The shooting assassination of centrist presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, second in voting intentions according to some polls, shocked the country on Wednesday.
Six Colombians were arrested for the crime and a seventh died in a confrontation with the police.
The assassination took place on the eve of the anticipated general elections on August 20 in Ecuador, where drug-related violence triggered the homicide rate to a record of 26 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, almost double that of the previous year.
President Guillermo Lasso, in a war against drug trafficking without being able to stop the violence, accused “organized crime” of the murder of the former journalist who denounced millionaire cases of corruption and that he had received death threats from the Los Choneros drug gang.
drug gangs
The Minister of the Interior, Juan Zapata, has indicated that more than 13 criminal organizations operate in Ecuador, among them Los Choneros, the oldest and most powerful, now allied with the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel.
But military intelligence accounts for up to 26 gangs linked to drug trafficking.
The most important rival of Los Choneros, The Wolvesis 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 drug trafficking the strategic ports on the Pacific are key, point of departure for cocaine to Europe and the United States.
The ardos forces of Ecuador in a prison in Guayaquil. AFP photo
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.
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 bodies.
“There is a problem in Ecuador that Colombia does not have today and that is that Ecuador has a policy to fight organized crime that has not prevented the public force and judicial organizations have the infiltration of 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 Ecuador, believes that the beginning 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 town on the border with Colombia.
“Take” of the State
The perpetrator was a dissident of the Colombian guerrilla FARC who murdered three members of a team from the newspaper Trade Quito and who was killed by Colombian security forces that year.
Among the victims of violence in Ecuador are also mayors, judges, prosecutors and dozens of civilians without criminal records.
Cocaine seizures are on the rise and in the last three years exceed 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 is becoming increasingly violent due to the way the State intervenes, through its security forces, in the cocaine market by beheading (capturing) ringleaders and increasing cocaine seizures,” said 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 “he is already taking over the state”, he claimed.
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.
“Have a State ambushed by organized crimeand an economy and a society besieged by the same organized crime,” another security expert told AFP who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals.
Criminal organizations have the power to challenge the state. “They have intelligence, many resources, high technology, a very high infiltration capacity,” he said.
The gangs have tens of thousands of members – as many as the police, which has some 60,000 officers – and even more sophisticated weapons.
AFP agency
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