Ecuador, Armed Forces, drug traffickers: the challenges of a country under siege

The rebellion launched by organized crime in Ecuador serves as an alarming warning to the newly arrived government about where the real power should lie. And what can happen if the message is not clear to you. This circumstance exposes President Daniel Noboa to two main challenges.

One of them is personal and at the same time political, it depends on how you will manage this battle get his re-election in 2025. The president, who took office last November, is serving the last stretch of Guillermo Lasso’s mandate.

That president resigned to avoid being overthrown in a political process manipulated by, among others, the populist Rafael Correa who, from his self-exile in Brussels, has now handled this crisis in the worst possible way. disqualifying Noboa as an “improvised” person at the head of a “failed state”.

The other challenge is more important and is linked to the mosaic of innovations observed in the region. to appear borders that the electorate and the political and economic superstructure are starting to take action against these mafias and corruption. A status quo who loses muscle.

Novoa has combined these two purposes send the military to the streets fighting cartels, a measure of extraordinary complexity whose success is by no means guaranteed.

To do this, the president characterized the mafias as transnational enemies, hence the men in uniform find meaning work against this antagonist. It is not an internal crime, but rather the country that is being attacked. A meaningful message in wording for a neighborhood that suffers from the same stigma and where it can start militarization multiplies of cities conquered by mafias.

It is possible to imagine the controversies that this construction could produce in countries where in the past the pretext of the terrorist offensive ended with the amputation of civil rights and of legality itself by the military. In this dimension, Nayib Bukele’s Salvadoran model also glosses over the dangerous criterion of the means are justified by the end.

The Ecuadorian government does not enter into these debates. Should. Try to regain the initiative. Unlike Lasso, when he declared these mafias also terrorist, Noboa obtained the unified support of Congress. But it’s about a path of risks and doubts, moreover, as to who or who is on each side.

Warning to judges

This difficulty explains the president’s warning to judges and prosecutors that they will be considered terrorists if they collude with organized crime. The comment refers to the call “Metastasis“, an appropriate name for an investigation that revealed links between drug traffickers and the national civil service that included it the entire scale of justice and security.

It is worth remembering that this chapter of the Ecuadorian drama began with the escape from prison of the mafia leader Adolfo Macías, head of the Choneros gang, similar to the Monos of Rosario, one of the criminals most dangerous in the country. This individual was serving a 34-year sentence. He fled when the government leaked to him that he would be transferred to a maximum security prison.

There is a revealing previous episode. After homocide In August of anti-corruption candidate, journalist Fernando Villavicencio, Macías was ordered into solitary confinement in a wing of the same prison he occupied in Guayaquil. It didn’t last long. Within moments a judge ordered it to be so he returned to his prison from where he directed the gang’s operations.

Nothing to be surprised about. It is estimated that a quarter of Ecuador’s 36 prisons They are in the hands of these organizations which, as Villavicencio himself denounced, have distributed mountains of money in bribes without stopping at the hierarchies.

Los Choneros operate associated with the Mexican Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel. It is worth remembering that the former right-wing president of that country, Felipe Calderón, also launched the army against drug traffickers in the second half of the 2000s. But he crashed into a wall. He soon discovered that troops had infiltrated, including the anti-drug czar himself.

As today in Ecuador, the Mexican state did it lost control of the prisons become bases of mafia operations. This deformation culminates with Cathedral, Colombia’s most sophisticated prison, in Antioquia, built by the famous drug trafficker Pablo Escobar. He had even planned a heliport for his travels.

Noboa is a center-right leader no political past his father (his father was a five-time presidential candidate), the son of a family of banana magnates, who forged a complex electoral partnership with a hardline center-left party, Revolución Ciudadana, and the conservative Social Cristiano.

This diverse group was supported by the need for recovery in Ecuador stability which in turn solves the main problem of a declining economy, without accumulation capacity and crossed deep social abysses that didn’t solvedollarization.

Economic contradiction always explains political movements, especially when it is not taken into consideration. Stagnation amplifies the progress of the gangs in these countries They recruit their “soldiers” among the sectors of society abandoned by the State.

Drug trafficking and corruption

Drug trafficking and corruption constitute a central problem for those ambitions of normality and growth. Hence the need to remove them or at least limit them. This occurred in neighboring Paraguay, which reached levels of been failed until its constitution understood the urgency of a turning point that would open up a panorama of greater possibilities.

Therefore, despite high margins of corruption, the country has managed to organize itself even if the danger has not disappeared. The main Brazilian drug cartelsbut not to the point of controlling the country.

Guatemala is another example to consider of these new airs. When on August 20th the Ecuadorians, with many young votes, elected Noboa, who did not appear at the polls, the Guatemalans did so on the same day for another absentee in the forecasts, the diplomat Bernardo Arévalo, a social democrat who campaigned against widespread corruption and organized crime devouring the country.

Arévalo will be sworn in this January 14th with the continued support of the international community, from Washington in particular. That support protected him from a wave of attempts to overthrow him before he took office by the outgoing government of the opaque Alejandro Gimmattei, his general prosecutor’s office and other mafia-allied officials.

US support, including in Ecuador, has practical significance. An improvement in these countries, which blocks corruption and organized crime, would reduce at the source the flow of migrants that hits the Rio Grande border in search of a mirage of salvation fueled by the deficiencies they leave behind.

Noboa must understand that militarization, even if effective, will be only one part of this distorted whole. He must regain control not only of the prisons, also from the port of Guayaquil which handles 300 thousand containers every month without registration, the drug portals in the world.

A simple measure of the scale of the challenge is provided by the fact that, for example, the judicial team that follows up on suspicious banking transactions has historically been so desperately underfunded that it cannot even make photocopies. The powerful hand of the mafia.

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