End of the Year Issue
By Pedro Meerbaum
February 29, 2024
The afternoon of Jan. 9 was a common day in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Workers and students returned to their normal routine with the end of the holidays and the beginning of 2024. As the second Tuesday of the year came to an end, the people of Guayaquil tuned in for the afternoon news. The program on the national television channel TC was typical: an introduction from the presenters, daily news, a couple of interviews, and a section on international affairs. It would have been an ordinary day, but instead, the audience watched, for 15 minutes, as masked gunmen invaded the broadcast network, forced staff to the floor, and shot their guns as the hostages cried for help. In that afternoon, there was no news besides terror.
The invasion of the broadcast followed the escape of notorious drug lord José Villamar, known as Fito, who had been detained since 2011 in the city of Guayaquil. His disappearance was reported on Jan. 7, and on Jan. 8 a wave of riots in six different Ecuadorian prisons took place, leading President Daniel Noboa to announce a state of internal armed conflict. The televised violence that befell right after was a response to Noboa's statement, easily seen as a confrontation between drug lords to the new Ecuadorian president — a stark reminder of the limits of his autonomy as a leader.
As Noboa intensifies its military response to the militia groups, and as the coast of Ecuador transforms its landscape into a quasi-war zone, questions are raised about the nature of gang violence in the country. The militia group works, mostly, with cocaine, and yet Ecuador is famously not a producer of narcotics. Instead, it is a channel in which cocaine produced by its neighbors, Peru and Colombia, is transported into North America. The cocaine that reaches Ecuador in its borders is then transported to port cities, like Guayaquil or Esmeralda, and is then shipped through the Pacific Ocean. To avoid dealing with anti-narcotics policing forces from Colombia or the U.S., the boats pass through the Galapagos islands, where they refill before reaching their destination in Mexico, Costa Rica, or Guatemala. The illegal goods are then smuggled into their final destination, the United States. The easy access to ports or lack of inspection throughout the process of smuggling the cocaine is a result of a marking characteristic of the Pacific Ocean: it is a sea of corruption.
Ecuador has been a transit country since the 1980s, but it was only in the last twenty years that it became one of the global cocaine traders. In the early 2000s, while the Colombian government tackled the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) cocaine fields, Ecuador suffered a strong economic crisis. On Jan. 9, 2000, exactly 24 years before the televised dispersion of terror, the central bank announced the dollarization of the Ecuadorian economy, replacing the Sucre with the American Dollar as the national legal tender. Ecuador, then, became an international target for money laundering. As writer James Bargent puts it, Ecuador is a "country bordering the world's biggest cocaine producer that uses the currency of the world's largest cocaine market."
Its potential to become a major exporter of cocaine and a hotspot for narcotrafficking in South America was boosted with the 2006 election of Rafael Correa. The former president of Ecuador led the country for 10 years, from 2007 to 2017, implementing internal policies that cultivated the strengthening of militia in the country: Correa decided to remove a U.S. naval base in the city of Manta, which later revealed in a scandal to be a campaign promise to the FARC in exchange for funding. The former president also politicized the judiciary and shifted his internal security focus to reducing the power of his political adversaries rather than properly tackling organized crime. In the years of administration by Correa, a blindspot is left in Ecuadorian land. Militia groups now have proper access to ports and the country's sky, transforming it into a huge global transport for cocaine.
It is within this pretext that, in 2023, Noboa gains popular support. A young and charismatic leader, the businessman builds his campaign around the extermination of gangs. And for the past month, Noboa has been successful in establishing a war on drugs. Military forces roam around Guayaquil with weapons, forcefully pulling people out of their cars and searching for any type of indication of gang involvement.
While his military-based approach has received overwhelming popularity within Ecuador, similarities are raised with other cases of war on drugs throughout Latin America that have, in the long term, been unsuccessful. The use of extensive military force to combat gang violence left its traces in Colombia, in its combat against FARC caused mass incarceration, extrajudicial executions of civilians, and an increase in violence. Likewise, in Brazil, raids against drug lords in favelas have been historically linked to the high-level loss of innocent civilian lives.
Noboa's tackle-down approach does not bring hope. It is paving the way for a stronger proliferation of violence, incarceration, and calamity. The military, like in Colombia, is not properly trained to deal with gang violence without, in return, acting in violence towards civilians. The temporary relief and support being given to the military action is not sustainable, it is bound to develop into a cycle of violence and a massive reduction of well-being in what was once the safest country in South America.
For Noboa, however, this approach gives him the legitimacy as a leader he sought, one that had been jeopardized by militia involvement since the beginning of the millennium. He has also received increasing support from the US, strengthening the diplomatic bonds between the two countries — without any direct intervention, internally nor externally, from the U.S. despite being the biggest receptor of Ecuadorian coke.
The war on drugs will, ultimately, be a war against civilians if Noboa's approach concentrates itself only in the streets of Guayaquil, instead of looking at where the militia has long stabilized itself — Ecuador's dearest political institutions.