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A wave of violence devastates several cities in Ecuador where groups of drug traffickers face each other to control drug revenues. The government decided to transfer the leaders of some groups to other prisons since it is in the prisons from where the drug business is managed, in part.
In Ecuador, the rate of Homicides have gone from 5.6 per 100,000 inhabitants to 20 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017 nowadays. What has happened in these five years? Several factors explain this rate of violence, all related to the drug trafficking and cutbacks in public policies.
In 2017, several ministries were regrouped in the Ministry of the Interior, including the one that coordinated security and drugs. Also 5 years ago, the international cartels began to pay locals in Ecuador, a transit country for Peruvian and Colombian drugs, not with dollars but with cocaine, favoring the development of a local cocaine market. Some groups that have become stronger not only in Guayaquil Y Emeraldbut also in cities like Samborondon, Santo Domingo either Duran. Fernando Carrión is a security expert, as the security expert explains to us, Fernando Carrion.
“The policy that President Lasso has made in these 17 months is six declarations of exception, nine months they have been in a state of exception. We have spent more time in the police action than in a normal situation, this shows that this policy is not giving results”, explains the specialist to RFI.
The origin of this situation must be sought, in part, five years ago. “The Ministry of Justice that managed the prisons and the coordinating Ministry of Security, the Ministry of the Interior that worked security, the National Council for the Control of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances were eliminated. All of this was brought together in a single ministry called the Ministry of the Interior and budget resources were substantially reduced,” continues Carrión.
Listen to the entire interview with Ecuadorian security expert Fernando Carrión
At the same time, at that time the Mexican and Colombian international drug trafficking groups that they used Ecuador as a transit country for drugs, they started paying drug gangs local, not with dollars but with cocaine.
Those local groups had begun to emerge at the beginning of the 21st century. “Until then, basically all the drugs entered the United States from Colombia, bypassing Ecuador, by plane and ship through Florida. But that closes, starting with the 2001 attacks, and the entrance by land opens up, and that’s where the Mexican cartels begin to grow substantially. And that articulation between the Colombian and Mexican cartels made Ecuador became a strategic country for the exit of narcotics”, clarifies the expert.
Another fact that will mark the infiltration of criminal groups in Ecuador is the change of currency from the Sucre to the dollar with which the country becomes a place where launder money. “In Ecuador, a small country, it is currently washed between 3,500 or 4,000 million dollars, which represents 4% of the national GDP”, he stresses.
Peru doubled production and Colombia increased it by 30%. “From Ecuadorian territory they are leaving between 700 and 800 tons of drugs”, specifies the expert.
Therefore, Ecuador is no longer just a transit point for cocaine, but has also become a market in which criminal groups dedicated to drug trafficking operate, putting the government in check. It is estimated that 22 drug trafficking groups with fairly strong militant bases operate in the country. Fernando Carrión gives as an example the group Tiguerones which operates in Esmeraldas. would have 1,500 troops in prison and 3,000 acting in freedom, the same number of troops as the ELN in Colombia. “With the difference that Colombia has 50 million inhabitants and the province of Esmeraldas has 650,000 inhabitants,” he emphasizes.
In this expansive panorama of criminal gangs linked to drug trafficking, repression has been increasing and overcrowding in prisons has exploded. A year ago there were about 40,000 inmates, with Lasso’s policy of releasing the elderly and sick, as well as prisoners for minor crimes, that figure has been lowered to about 34,000, but even so the situation is explosive in some penitentiary centers completely controlled by these groups.
“The largest and most complex prison in Ecuador, the Litoral penitentiary (Guayaquil), has more than 10,000 people deprived of liberty spread over twelve pavilions. Each pavilion is managed by one of these criminal groups. The big problem we had this Thursday was in pavilion 12 with a group called Chone Killers because they decided to relocate their leaders to another prison, also in Guayaquil, called La Roca, and that generated this uprising. Ecuador’s big problem is that prisoners they are not classified in prisons by the crimes they have committed, but according to affiliation to each of these criminal groups”, explains Fernando Carrión.
