2023-08-12 06:59:07
The murder of Fernando Villavicencio has brought to our present a country that is usually quite forgotten: Ecuadorthe nation on the Pacific coast, between the north of Peru and the south of Colombia, which is undergoing an electoral process –the first round of the presidential elections is held on the 20th of this same month of August– which has brought to the fore the deep crisis you are in.
Or perhaps it is better to say the crises, because as the expert explained Romanian David Ortiz in an interview in Dieter’s Night of esRadioin the Andean country three different problems overlap: the political problems derived from the maneuvers of the left represented by the ex-president convicted and on the run Rafael Correa; the emergence of large-scale drug trafficking and both Colombian and, above all, Mexican cartels; and international interference, both from the closest countries and from global powers.
The narco-states and the left
The first problem, the irruption of drug cartels in politics, is not exclusive to Ecuador but, unfortunately, it is affecting to a greater or lesser extent all the countries of the region. Without going any further, in neighboring Colombia just a few days ago the son of President Petro recognized that drug money had been part of the financing of his father’s campaign.
Not minor are the relationships between drug money in Peru and the ultra-left movements inheritors of Sendero Luminosowho brought to power the now ousted Pedro Castillo and that one of the axes of their program was to expand coca crops.
And the extreme case is, of course, that of Venezuela, where the largest drug organization in the world is the so-called “cartel of the suns”, which receives this name from the suns that distinguish the generals of the army of the Maduro regime. . Without forgetting that the top leaders of the regime such as Diosdado Cabello or Maduro himself They are wanted in several countries – not only in the United States – for drug trafficking.
The narco arrives in Ecuador
The problem is now reaching Ecuador with great force, which has become one of the drug logistics centers in Latin Americaas Román David Ortiz explains: “There is refined and distributed” the drug that enters from the north from Colombia and from the south from Peru, to later be shipped mainly from Guayaquil.
Of course, drugs do not travel alone: criminal gangs from Salvador itself are growing with it, and both the producing cartels from Colombia and the importers from Mexico also come: the presence of some of the drugs has been detected in the country. the most important Mexican cartels: the Sinaloa and the Jalisco Nueva Generación.
And of course, and just as they do in the rest of the continent, these multimillion-dollar criminal gangs extend their tentacles towards politics and elections, trying to get the most permissive candidates with crime to be elected, something that can be done both by improving the possibilities of some financing their campaigns, like worsening those of others with threats and, where appropriate, with attacks.
One of the problems that Ecuador finds itself in this situation is that it is dealing with a new phenomenon there and neither the police nor the government nor civil society itself seem prepared to face it: the forces of order have neither the means nor the knowledge to confront the cartels, corruption reaches increasingly large areas of politics, the judiciary and the police themselves, and even those who face the threat such as himself Fernando Villavicencio does not seem aware of the level of risk they are running: the murdered candidate, for example, refused to wear a bulletproof vest.
The political crisis
This irruption of the narco in the life of Ecuador coincides, and not by chance, with the political crisis that the country is experiencing and that it has been caused above all by those related to Rafael Correa, the former president who since 2020 has been escaped from justice after being sentenced for the so-called Bribery Case.
Related
After the scandal of the conviction of the former president, the right-wing candidate prevailed in the 2021 presidential elections: Guillermo Lasso achieved a solid victory against the candidate of a left that has not accepted this defeat and since then has tried to overthrow the government, to the point that President Lasso had to call elections for this month of August, that is, long before finish his term.
Despite the fact that during the two years that he had spent in the National Assembly of Ecuador, Villavicencio was not part of Lasso’s party – the CREO Movement – and that he was running in these elections as a candidate for the Movement Buildshe was considered the closest presidential candidate to the still president in an election in which Lasso’s party had decided not to have its own candidate.
In any case, at least in recent years, Ecuadorian politics is full of surprising transformations and is prey to notable instability: alliances are formed and broken with great ease and parties frequently change their names and sometimes even their ideology. . Without going any further, the one who supported Rafael Correa, Country Allianceturned into the hands of his successor, Lenin Moreno, who pursued a policy much more to the right of Correa’s, also separating himself from the Bolivarian entente that is strangling the continent. This transformation – which led to several judicial clashes between the different wings of the organization – ended up even involving a change of name: now it’s called Movement Move.
This changing soup of parties and pacts weakened Lenin Moreno during his presidency and also Lasso, who has not even been able to complete his. Likewise, it seems clear that it makes institutions weaker and more difficult to stop the correistasthat now They are grouped in Citizen Revolution – a name that the Correa government used for itself – whose candidate was the best placed in the polls for the first round of the elections, which are held on August 20.
Some of the latest polls placed Villavicencio in second positionwhich would have allowed him to access a second round in which he would have had many possibilities, since the condemned Correa arouses at least as much rejection as adhesions.
Now, according to Román David Ortiz explained in esRadiowhat happened could favor “the other candidate who has a tougher position on crime,” Jan Topicdespite the fact that he has a somewhat complicated past with corruption issues, “but he has made security his main campaign issue” and, in fact, he is presenting himself with an alliance called For a Country without Fear.
In this complex context, although some may think that the logical thing to do would be to delay the elections, the truth is that it is not that simple: as Román David Ortiz recounted, “this would feed the idea that Lasso does not want to leave power and it would generate more lack of legitimacy in the institutions”.
international interference
Finally, the third of Ecuador’s crises has to do with its situation on the board of international politics: first by Moreno and then by Lasso, removed from the Bolivarian alliances in the region, it is one of the few reliable partners of the United States in South Americabut has trouble resisting the bites of other powers.
Mainly from Chinawith which Ecuador has a significant financial debt that Villavicencio himself denounced in his day as a setup to feed the corruption of the Correa government, which was the one that acquired it.
Also Russiawhich we already know has interfered in a multitude of electoral processes and has tried to fuel crises in practically the entire West -including its not-so-holy relations with Catalan separatism- would be trying to influence Ecuadorian politics, for which it would enjoy a privileged connection with the coreism.
In short, and as is happening in practically all of Ibero-America, Ecuador is on the verge of become a narco-state and fall into the hands of an alliance between leftists, dictatorial powers and drug traffickers that, as we have already seen in more than one example, will only bring misery and dictatorship to this Andean country that until now was resisting the ravages of this narco-communist wave that is sweeping through the continent.
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