Sixty-one 9-millimeter casings, 3 2-23 casings, and a grenade were scattered at the entrance to the Anderson school in Quito, where on Wednesday, after 6 in the afternoon, Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated.
(Read here: Fernando Villavicencio’s running mate will contest the Presidency of Ecuador)
Three of them hit the applicant’s head, just as a rally was ending and he was boarding the unarmored double-cab truck that the police had arranged to mobilize him.
(See also: President Petro’s theses regarding the murder of Fernando Villavicencio)
This, despite the fact that his relatives warned that he was the only candidate in the competition who “I had a 97 percent probability of being attacked”as his wife said, Veronica Sarauzbefore the press, or as his lawyer, Luis Fernández, pointed out, who pointed out that “everywhere Villavicencio went there were bomb threats.”
If I keep mentioning the name of Fito and mentioning the Choneros they will break me
The police justify themselves by arguing that they had structured three security rings around the leader, that he had made the fight against corruption and against correísmo his flag, and that he had denounced threats against his life on multiple occasions.
Which doesn’t explain why he didn’t have an armored car or why he walked out the front door, Against all security protocol.
The crime —apparently carried out by a group of Colombians, six of whom have been captured, and another of whom died after the police reaction—, which has shaken Ecuadorian society like never before, could become the turning point of the most serious security crisis that the country has ever experienced due to the brutal impact of drug trafficking businesses and their infiltration at different levels and in multiple institutions.
It is what could become, in the opinion of the analysts consulted by TIMEin the perfect storm, because the alarming figures of violence that move around the mafia are added to political instability, an extremely weakened government, a social crisis without recent precedents and the proximity of elections (August 20). marked by murders and threats. A scale scenario that recalls the Colombia of the late 80s and 90s with the narco-paramilitary alliance.
“If I keep mentioning the name of Fito and mentioning the Choneros, they are going to break me,” Villavicencio had premonitorily anticipated in one of his statements, alluding to one of the drug gangs and its leader.
So much so that at least nine political figures have lost their lives in the dozens of hitmen attacks so far in 2023from candidates to assembly members (congressmen), councilors and mayors, such as Agustín Intriago from Manta, shot to death on July 23, when he was delivering works in that Pacific city.
From transit to distribution
“Ecuadorians have not finished dimensioning the crisis of insecurity, crime and violence that has been unleashed in recent years due to the paralysis of a State and a government that cannot manage the mafia crisis and has allowed it to become endemic,” he says for this newspaper the journalist and scholar of the infiltration of international drug trafficking in the country Arturo Torres.
And it is that Ecuador, due to its geographical position and its institutional weakness, has become a key player in the operation of transnational drug trafficking, to the point that it went from being a place of transit to being a storage and distribution center.
Surrounded by two of the largest producers—Colombia and Peru—its highways have become convenient routes for taking drugs to ports on the Pacific, from where shipments are made to the United States, Central America, and Europe.
As early as 2019, the State Department estimated that a third of Colombian cocaine production passed through the territory of its neighboring Ecuador. There are two routes that cross the country from Colombia: through the province of Esmeraldas, towards the ports of Guayas and Manabí; and the Amazon route, which takes shipments through Sucumbíos towards Brazil.
“In Colombia the drug is cultivated and macerated. Then it goes to Ecuador, where it goes through crystallizers and from there to the collection centers, where international distributors take over.”, explains Colonel (r) Mario Pazmiño, an expert in security and intelligence.
The installation of ‘kitchens’ along the border with Colombia is explained by the fact that, according to the United Nations, 35 percent of Colombian coca crops were less than 10 km from the border with Ecuador.
In this scheme, local gangs operated the business for Colombian cartels. This is not new. But with the irruption of the Mexican, Albanian and Brazilian cartels, the market became fragmented, the gangs grew, they began to confront each other and the situation of violence began to overflow, initially in the coastal cities where the shipments are taken to the sea. , but for just over two years the phenomenon has metastasized in other regions.
There is an explosive fragmentation of local gangs and the empowerment of dozens of criminal gangs that provide services to the Sinaloa cartels
“There is an explosive atomization of local gangs and the empowerment of dozens of criminal gangs that provide services to the Sinaloa, Jalisco Nueva Generación and the Balkans cartels and that have grown as local armies, to the point of gathering thousands of members,” says Torres. .
Local gangs such as ‘Los Choneros’ (from the town of Chone), ‘Lobos’ and ‘Tiguerones’ strengthened themselves with money from drug trafficking and other activities such as extortion, express kidnapping and illegal mining..
“These resources have not only allowed them to arm themselves to the teeth, but also to corrupt the system,” says Torres.
These disputes have reached their boiling point in the confrontations and prison massacres that have claimed the lives of dozens of inmates and have exposed the brutality and complexity of the phenomenon to the eyes of the world.
“From the first moment of the massacres in the prisons, the existence of a criminal alliance was revealed and, at the same time, the involvement of police officers and armed forces linked to organized crime was made public,” explains the professor and expert. on security issues Luis Córdova.
This criminal alliance “has infiltrated the security forces, Police and Armed Forces to the core,” something Villavicencio denounced. “There are Police ties to these structures (…), the Police know, Police intelligence knows where the hideouts of criminals, drug traffickers, illegal mining, and white-collar criminals are; They know where the hitmen are, ”he assured hours before he died.
It was not an isolated event that in 2021 the United States withdrew the visas of four Police generals and that the ambassador in Quito, Michael Fitzpatrick, used the expression “narco generals” when expressing his concern about the infiltration of drug traffickers in the security forces. But the Quito government remained indignant.
of the most violent
The figures make it clearer: so far in 2023, close to 123 tons of drugs have been seized and 7,000 people arrested for drug trafficking. It is estimated that around 700 or 800 tons per year move through the country’s ports. It is projected that by the end of 2023 Ecuador will become one of the most violent countries in the region, accounting for 40 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest rate in its history. At least 10 narco-criminal groups are fighting for territorial control of macro and micro-trafficking, which has resulted in 3,777 murders having been carried out since January, the majority by hitmen, score adjustments and confrontations, according to police data obtained by EL TIEMPO.
Since 2018, some decisions on governance in the security sector have been made in Ecuador that cut institutional capacities (…)
Only last January, the Minister of the Interior, Juan Zapata, in the context of the sectional elections, delivered to the Prosecutor’s Office a reserved list of 28 candidates suspected of alleged links to drug trafficking, illegal mining or other related crimes, which shows How far are the mafia tentacles going?
One issue on which Ecuadorian analysts do not agree is the impact that the closure of the base that the US had installed in Manta for control and interdiction meant for the business. Under the argument that it violated the country’s sovereignty, President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) did not renew the agreement, which in Pazmiño’s opinion allowed the almost total penetration of the large international drug holding and reduced cooperation. Others believe that its end was more a political issue and that it did not influence at that time in a shot of the associated crime or in the fall of the seizures.
Carolina Andrade, Quito’s Secretary of Security, introduces another element to the analysis that has to do with Colombia, beyond her responsibility. “I think the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC had a first impact because, from our point of view, there was a much stronger emphasis on the defense and security axis, but not on a social axis. Which means that the part of the border that we share did not have the social intervention that was required and the area continued to concentrate spaces to germinate and develop illicit economies, ”she says.
Andrade also points out that “since 2018, some decisions on governance in the security sector were made in Ecuador that cut institutional capacities (…). So, the reduction of the budget, of State capacities to a minimum, It coincides with a context in which illicit crops have grown at a regional level and Ecuador has become a target where drugs can more easily leave”.
To which is added, according to the official, a serious social crisis related to poverty and lack of opportunities: “People are dying from violence, from hunger and are migrating through the Darién or reaching the US-Mexico border. So there is a security issue, of course, but mainly there is a social problem that has been totally abandoned: children recruited by criminal organizations or who drop out of the educational system. There is no leadership, there are no priorities in budget terms and there is no efficiency to execute those budgets either”.
Now the question that remains is whether the next president, whose mandate will be barely 18 months, will be able to put together a solid policy that attacks the problems of security, financing and infiltration of the mafias, because clearly the 16 states of exception, which in two years President Guillermo Lasso has decreed, they have been of little use.
ANA LUCIA ROMAN
FOR THE TIME
REMOVED
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