In Ecuador, the global reach

of Mexico’s warring drug

cartels fuels a national crisis
SLIDE
Mexico’s two main drug cartels have long taken their deadly rivalry with
them as they expand into distant markets from Asia to Australia to Africa,
but never before with such intensive street gang violence and a presidential
declaration of a state of “internal armed conflict” this week in Ecuador.
Gunmen from an Ecuadorian gang believed aligned with Mexico’s Jalisco
New Generation cartel took over a television station during a live
broadcast and brandished explosives. Meanwhile, a rival gang believed to
be backed by Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel called for peace — in a statement
apparently issued from Mexico City.
Ecuador is attractive as a shipping point for drugs because the South
American country is sandwiched between two top cocaine producers,
Colombia and Peru. Ecuador has been ravished by poverty, the COVID-19
pandemic, a weak law enforcement system and corruption, but it also has
a big active, legitimate foreign trade.
According to a 2023 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime, “the proportion of cocaine reported to the Regional Intelligence
Office for Western Europe with Ecuador identified as a departure point
rose from 14 per cent in 2018 to 29 percent in 2020 and 28 per cent in
2021.”
Much of that cocaine was connected to Mexican cartels, who have moved
into producer countries like Colombia following the 2016 peace accords
there with leftist rebels. Coca bush fields in Colombia have also been
moving closer to the border with Ecuador due to the breakup of criminal
groups after the 2016 demobilization of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia.
The problem worsened when the Mexican cartels stopped paying the local
gangs in cash, and began paying them in drugs instead, said Fernando
Carrión, a political science professor at the Latin American Faculty of
Social Sciences in Ecuador.
The local gangs “have to sell those drugs in local markets, and that forces
local gangs to organize, increases local (drug) consumption and
laundering, and for this reason also increases the violence,” Carrión said,
as street-dealing turf battles cause homicide rates to spike.
Last Sunday, the leader of the Choneros, Adolfo Macías, disappeared from
the prison where he was held. Since Macías’ apparent escape, gangs have
kidnapped police officers and inmates have taken at least 178 corrections
personnel hostage.