Mexican Cartels Are Turning Once-Peaceful Ecuador Into a Narco War Zone

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgwxyn/ecuador-mexico-drug-war-cocaine?utm_source=reddit.com

Ecuadorean anti-narcotics police stand guard next to packs of cocaine from a 3-ton shipment seized from a container of bananas, in the port of Guayaquil, Ecuador, on April 1, 2022. Photo by MARCOS PIN/AFP via Getty Images

“We are fighting to contain this sickness that is threatening our country,” said an official of the violence created by Mexico's cartels in Ecuador.

ESMERALDAS, Ecuador — The graffiti image of a tiger with bared fangs makes clear who controls the neighborhood in this impoverished city near the Colombian border: The Tiguerones, an Ecuadorian gang allied with Mexico’s brutal Jalisco New Generation cartel. God help anyone who forgets it: Last fall two men were found hanging from a bridge, tied up by their feet, decapitated. One man, still clothed in shorts and a red shirt, hung so low his torso was almost touching the street; the other, dangling several feet higher, had a trash bag covering his body. A note left by the corpses suggested the men were killed for being informants.

It was the kind of gruesome display of violence used to instill terror in cartel-dominated regions of Mexico, but the gangs were just getting started. Over the next 24 hours, they detonated a dozen car bombs and explosives in coordinated attacks in Esmeraldas and in Guayaquil, a port city to the south that’s become a major jumping off point for cocaine headed to Europe. They also killed five police officers and took seven prison guards hostage. Now, Ecuadorian soldiers travel in squads of no less than 30 to impose a 9 p.m. curfew on the city.

These are worrying signs of how the Mexican cartels have exported their drug war south and are quickly turning Ecuador into a war zone. The Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel are battling for dominance over the transport of cocaine from the vast, green coca fields of Colombia, through Ecuador to the United States and Europe.

An Ecuadorian soldier patrols the streets in the town of San Lorenzo, a few miles south of the Colombian border. Photo by Miguel Fernández-Flores for VICE World News.

Ecuador has long been known as one of the most peaceful countries in Latin America, but its soaring murder rate is comparable to Medellin, Colombia during the reign of Pablo Escobar. Ecuador’s homicide rate jumped 245 percent between 2020 and 2022. Murders reached 26.6 per 100,000 residents in 2022 compared to 7.8 per 100,000 in the U.S., putting it right behind troubled Honduras and Venezuela.

Gang members are being sent to cartel-financed training camps in northern Ecuador to learn how to kill, according to drug traffickers interviewed by VICE World News. Children are being recruited as assassins because under Ecuador’s legal system they face relatively little prison time if they are caught.

This month, President Guillermo Lasso issued a decree ending a 12-year-old ban on civilians owning firearms, which he said would further the goal of defeating “delinquency, drug trafficking and organized crime.” The message? With police and the military unable to protect citizens from gang violence, access to weapons might give citizens a fighting chance.

“We are fighting to contain this sickness that is threatening our country,” said Ecuadorian General Alexander Levoyer, a war veteran who now oversees the military’s operations along the border with Colombia.

Nestled between the world’s two biggest cocaine suppliers, Colombia and Peru, Ecuador has long been a transit hub for cocaine because of its geography and lax security. But if Ecuador was once a thoroughfare for cocaine, it’s now a superhighway. Ecuadorian authorities are seizing so much cocaine they are turning it into concrete.

“We are a small country up against big mafias that have enormous financial resources,” said Pablo Ramírez, Ecuador's anti-narcotics chief. “Ecuador has institutional weaknesses that allow these criminal organizations to take advantage of our location between these two countries.” He estimated that 45 percent of the cocaine produced in Colombia now passes through Ecuador.

02.28.23

Mexican cartels have long played a supporting role in Ecuador's drug trade, but now they’re calling the shots, financing the production of cocaine by Colombian guerrilla groups, paying them to transport it into Ecuadorian territory, and then hiring Ecuadorian gangs to move the cocaine into ports and boats at sea. Flush with cash and weapons, the Ecuadorian gangs are waging a proxy war on the cartels’ behalf and fighting for power amongst themselves, turning the country into Latin America’s new killing fields.