The day Goofy lost his hand and Ecuador sank

Everyone liked Goofy. He didn't hurt anyone. It was not known for sure who his father was, and his alcoholic mother left him alone at home for weeks. He became a petty thief who stole a T-shirt from a clothesline, a gas cylinder from a clueless housewife, a soft drink from the corner store that he hid in his pants. He was annoying to the neighbors in the same way as stinging insects. One day, however, he robbed the wrong person in El Arbolito, a neighborhood in Durán, the municipality with the highest homicide rate in Ecuador. The gang leader of that area, who was called Bob Marley Because he was black, he ordered his right hand to be cut off with a machete, at the wrist. Goofy now begs for money from drivers who stop at the traffic lights on a long avenue that connects with Guayaquil. He shows them the stump through the window.

Bob Marley was arrested in 2020, accused of being behind a wave of murders in El Arbolito. The place is strategic for drug trafficking: the arms of a river that borders it lead to the sea, where boats set sail to the rest of the world. 60% of the world's cocaine trafficking passes through here. Criminals in this area have stopped moving by car, they now use motor boats. Ecuadorian gangs, in collaboration with Mexican cartels, have become the Amazon of drug exports. That rain of money has made his power grow spectacularly in just three years. They control prisons, ports, customs, taxi fleets and fruit and fish markets. They have managed to infiltrate the police and the army. They have judges and prosecutors on their payroll. Their tentacles have reached politics, where they have adept mayors and governors. Criminal gangs, almost overnight, threaten to control all the resources of the State.

The last governments have helplessly assisted the expansion of drug trafficking. Nothing has been able to stop him. The current president, Daniel Noboa, the son of the richest man in the country, 36 years old and barely two months in office, has declared war on them through a presidential decree. 22 of these gangs have been considered terrorist organizations, which has given the army the possibility of confronting them directly. Beyond that, Noboa has not shown great leadership; his public speeches can be counted on one hand. Nobody knows very well what plan he has in mind to face the greatest security crisis in the history of his country.

At the moment, the military patrols the streets. Tonight, the infantry of the land force enters La Peca, armed to the teeth, a neighborhood of low concrete houses crossed by power lines. The moonlight illuminates like a lamp. “We know that there are criminal groups in this sector,” says Captain Carlos Riofrío. His men show their long weapons and click their boots against the asphalt. In their wake, the few who have violated the curfew, which begins at 11 p.m., take shelter in their homes. They lock the doors and bar the windows. A few peek through the curtain, but they hide as soon as they feel they are being watched. With their faces hidden behind their balaclavas, the soldiers plunge into the night like horsemen of death.

“There, there,” the captain shouts, pointing to a side street.

Four shadows run into the darkness.

The soldiers jump out of the truck and chase them through the neighborhood. Screams and gasps begin to be heard. One of the boys stops running, takes off his shoes and stands against the wall, arms raised. A Heckler & Koch rifle is pointed at his chest. His face shows a grimace of terror. Up ahead, a soldier has knocked another down on the sidewalk, and imprisons his back with the sole of his boot. He aims right at her head. A third throws himself to the ground and suddenly finds himself surrounded by cannons. The last one also sees death up close, he too gives up. In less than a minute they have been neutralized.

They check their arms, backs, chests for tattoos. They want to find machetes and wolves, proof that they belong to the main gangs, Los Choneros and Los Lobos. The boys have nothing on them, no drugs, no weapons, just a few trinkets they have rescued from the trash. Even so, they put them in patrol cars to check their criminal records. This morning they have already hunted at least four.

These days videos of abuses by the authorities have been leaked. In one, they put three boys in a hole and spray them with pepper spray, without letting them come out. It is one of the tests that soldiers pass during their military training. One of the concerns of security experts is that the president's broad approach may lead to human rights violations, as happened in Mexico when Felipe Calderón took the military out of the barracks or, more recently, the case of El Salvador. “We must annihilate the enemy,” concedes a soldier as he continues the search for gang members tonight.

Two very thin boys, wearing caps, are hiding between some cars. You can see them with the naked eye, you don't have to be very clever. The soldiers subdue them in the blink of an eye. They imprison them against the hood of the car and search them. They also don't carry anything of importance. A neighbor, upon seeing the scene, dares to go out to the door of his house and shouts to the boys: “not even rascals (criminals) you two are worth it.” He says that they are two drug addicts who have fed up with him because they wander around the neighborhood to see what they can get. The soldiers let them go and they walk away while pulling up their pants, looking like they have crossed paths with the devil. In the following hours, the military convoy will come across prostitutes, beggars, crazy people, drunks, idlers who are not afraid of death. Nothing to hang a medal on. The Government has made public that in this week in which it has tried to take control of the nation, it has arrested 1,105 people, it has dismantled 28 “terrorist groups”, it has freed 56 kidnapped people, and it has detained 27 prisoners. Two police officers and five alleged criminals have died along the way, according to these official data.

A power forged in prisons

The power of the gangs, although it sounds counterintuitive, was atomized in the prisons. President Rafael Correa toughened the Penal Code and multiplied the prison population by four, from 10,000 to 40,000 inmates. He drastically reduced homicides. Ecuador was a security bubble in the middle of two countries as violent as Peru and Colombia. However, under the radar, the expansion of the gangs and their recruitment in prisons began to incubate. The boys went to prison without any affiliation for dealing, for having run over a woman with a motorcycle on a zebra crossing or for hitting their girlfriend, and there, as a way of survival, they were forced to join one of the gangs. . Not doing so was putting a noose around your neck.

At first, Los Choneros dominated the rest, having a charismatic leader, Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias Rasquina. The Chone Killers, Tiguerones —former jailers who went into the underworld—, Lobos and Lagartos responded to Rasquiña until he was murdered in December 2020. That marked a before and after. The gangs broke up and began to dispute supremacy. Prison riots took place. In 2021, in a prison in Guayaquil, mor
e than 100 prisoners were murdered with knives and machete. Those who won beheaded the losers and threw their heads into the toilets. One of them had his chest opened, his heart taken out and bitten while it was still beating. The guards, accomplices through annexation or ineptitude, attended the massacre without being able to do anything.

That day when madness reigned, a boy who did not come from marginality attended this carnage trying to be invisible, so that no one would notice his presence. He had been imprisoned months before for illicit association, a crime that was fabricated for him for being one of the student leaders in the protests against Guillermo Lasso, a president who during his two and a half years in office let crime grow like an ivy. Carlos, to give him a name, entered the Guayaquil prison in the dark, without knowing what he was going to find. His mother, a lawyer, was working to free him. The first day they told him that he had to pay $80 a week (73 euros) for protection and access to a bed and food. If he didn't do it, he would end up in El Hoyo, the punishment cell where the poor, the crippled, the homeless are crowded without a bathroom.

Carlos paid, but those who did not end up enslaved by the leaders of the pavilions. They wash clothes, clean rooms, cook, serve as sexual objects. Only the poorest boys who kill without regard, those who become hitmen, gunmen, are saved from that. The prisons are full of prisoners who have served more than 60% of their sentence, which should grant them freedom, but due to the corrupt bureaucratic system that surrounds the process, it is very difficult. 90% of those who have exceeded that time do not manage to leave, they remain in limbo. They need to prove that they have not committed any offense, pass a psychological report, prove that they have attended academic training courses and present a document, signed before a notary, from a family member or friend who assures that they will provide a roof for them. In practice, these workshops do not exist, psychological tests have to be falsified because there are none and the judges' secretaries, if they do not receive a bribe, do not set a date for the hearing. Practically everyone who sees the light of the street gets it by extorting some official. Carlos, who now wears a jacket and tie and is free, is dedicated to helping some prisoners overcome this process.

The Government has recovered some of the most violent prisons in the country, such as those in Guayaquil, but this has happened in the past and the gangs have returned to rule them. The fear of the people is that, after this period of turmoil, everything will return to normal, that is, to the rule of the gangs, with the cartels deeply rooted as happens in Mexico, where the preponderance of crime forms part of the landscape. Existence, as one of the soldiers hidden behind a balaclava, with his rifle raised, recalls, is summed up in a simple equation:

—Either we kill, or they kill us. There is no other.

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