CD Goette-Luciak | Vox

Cocaine, cartels, and corruption: The crisis in Ecuador, explained

2024-01-12T11:47:27-05:00

Military personnel stands guard at Canela Radio on January 10, 2024 in Quito, Ecuador. President Noboa declared “internal armed conflict” after hooded and armed men broke into TC Television’s live broadcast, among other violent incidents across the country on Tuesday | Getty Images

Ecuador, according to its president Daniel Noboa, is now “in a state of war.” Earlier this week he had announced a state of emergency after the leader of one of the country’s top two gangs escaped from prison. The following day, armed gang members stormed the TC Television news program, broadcasting their hostage-taking and violence live to make an announcement of their own.

It was far from the only act of shocking violence the country has suffered this week.

In what appeared to be a coordinated campaign Tuesday — and one with a brazenness that recalled Mexico’s cartels in the mid-2010s, or worse — armed men stormed hospitals, businesses, and universities. Prisons were taken over in violent riots, bombs were set off in multiple locations, and police and prison guards were kidnapped and murdered. At least 10 people were killed in gang attacks, including police, and over a hundred prison staff were taken hostage.

It may seem like an inexplicable turn for Ecuador, a country that many experts, including Felipe Botero, a program head at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, told Vox used to be an “island of peace” in an often-troubled region.

But this turn to violence in an upper-middle-income country of 18 million didn’t happen overnight.

While there are factors that accelerated a spike in crime over the last couple of years, experts say this is a story nearly a decade in the making. Ecuador’s security crisis is the product of years of growing impunity enjoyed by gangs, the influence of transnational crime groups, shifts in global cocaine consumption, and, above all, increasing institutional corruption.

That means even with President Noboa’s promised military crackdown, this chaos won’t be solved overnight.

How Ecuador went from an “island of peace” to a crisis of this level, briefly explained

For decades, Ecuador’s stability and security distinguished it from its neighbors, Peru and Colombia, the largest cocaine producers in the world. Sandwiched between the two, Ecuador often acted as a drug transit country, but it did not suffer from the violence and armed conflict that plagued its neighbors.

In the 1990s, Ecuador’s drug trade “was controlled top-down by the FARC” — the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, the Marxist guerrilla group that waged a 50-year struggle against the Colombian government — and “there wasn’t a ton of competition and there weren’t really any clashes with the Ecuadorean state” says Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It was a stable situation.”

Then in 2016, the FARC largely demobilized — a historic peace process for Colombia, but also one that created a power vacuum in northern Ecuador. Simultaneously, cocaine demand started shifting drastically, declining in the US and surging in Europe, where since 2016 cocaine seizures have quadrupled, according to Freeman. “That’s made control of ports much more important,” he says, as cocaine headed for Europe is loaded into shipping containers. “Obviously, you’re not flying little planes from Colombia to France.”

And, well, Ecuador has some great ports for cocaine smugglers — specifically Guayaquil on the Pacific coast, the country’s largest port city and now the epicenter of the violent crisis.

This joint power vacuum and massive trafficking opportunity invited foreign groups like Mexican cartels and Venezuelan gangs to play a larger role in Ecuador’s drug trade. Even the Albanian mafia, Freeman says, capitalized on the FARC’s demobilization and flooded into Guayaquil to set up shop in the 2010s.

Ecuador’s two largest gangs, Los Lobos and Los Choneros, had long maintained an uneasy peace, but assassinations of gang leaders in 2020 sparked a power struggle. Since then, the groups have rapidly splintered into factions vying for control of territory, particularly Guayaquil, says Glaeldys González Calanche, a fellow at the International Crisis Group.

Experts said those foreign criminal groups took sides among Ecuador’s gangs, further fueling the turf war. “Los Lobos are believed to be tethered to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, while Los Choneros are purportedly in alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel,” both out of Mexico, she adds. “Splinter groups are now locked in a fierce competition for control of domestic consumer markets and trafficking routes, further fueling the cycle of violence.”

This has all had terrifying effects for the country.

For years, Ecuador had one of the lowest murder rates in the region, but homicides have more than quadrupled since 2018. Bombings, assassinations, and shootouts have proliferated. In 2022, when headless corpses were found suspended from a bridge in the city of Esmeraldas, some analysts concluded that the kind of cartel violence that terrorized Mexican cities like Juarez in the 2000s had found a new home in Ecuador. Last year, a presidential candidate, who had reportedly received threats from the local affiliates of the Sinaloa cartel, was assassinated.

While former President Guillermo Lasso attempted to crack down on gangs, increasing police presence and even deploying the military failed to contain the violence. From 2022 to 2023, Ecuador’s murder rate nearly doubled.

Experts and former local officials say that not only has the government failed to curtail the violence, it may be abetting it as well.

“State actors are facilitating the operation of organized crime,” Botero says, pointing to the attorney general’s raids on the homes of judges, prosecutors, and police last month, which led to the arrest of dozens of officials linked to organized crime, including even a former drug czar and a president of the judicial council. “The state and law enforcement entities cannot control the situation of criminality and violence” he says, because “they are involved with organized crime in the country.”

This week’s crisis only underscores that point: Experts told Vox it seemed apparent that the prison escape Sunday that prompted Noboa’s emergency declaration was carried out with ease; Choneros kingpin Adolfo “Fito” Macías fled on the very day he was supposed to be transferred to a new maximum security prison. Then on Monday, a leader of the Los Lobos gang, Fabricio Colón, also disappeared from his cell.

“The [cartels] actually command the prisons,” says Daniela Chacón, who served as vice mayor of Quito from 2014 to 2016 and as a city councilor from 2014 to 2019, pointing to Fito’s escape. Chacón says recent events are “a show of control and power from organizations that have been already accustomed to running the show the past few years.”

Can Ecuador reverse course?

Noboa on Tuesday said Ecuador is in an “internal armed conflict,” issuing a decree that designated over 20 gangs as terrorist groups and authorized Ecuador’s military to “neutralize” them.

While Noboa has declared war, Chacón says the military can’t fix institutional corruption, warning: “The armed response will only go so far when you are fighting organizations that have more money, more power, that move more quickly, than the state does.”

“The Ecuadorian people are rightly clamoring for effective, firm government and a state role in quelling this violence and returning what, for most Ecuadoreans, was a sense of peace and security,” says John Walsh, director for drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, but he warns that the militarization of Ecuador’s law enforcement might also spawn new threats to security. Fighting organized crime in ways that skirt the rule of law, Walsh argues, “may achieve a short-term semblance of victory, but ultimately it’s serving the aims of those who would destroy and co-opt the state to begin with, and it will leave everybody less secure.”

Noboa has been vocal about his admiration of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, pledging last week to build massive prisons modeled after Bukele’s. Bukele was elected in 2019 promising to end the gang violence epidemic that contributed to El Salvador once having the highest murder rate in the world; he has largely done so via a campaign of mass arrests that has made him domestically popular even as it has been criticized for widespread human rights abuse. Noboa’s state of emergency, which curtails civil liberties, would also seem to take a page out of Bukele’s security policy: The Salvadoran president has extended a similar state of exception since March 2022.

Walsh also points to the failure of militarized approaches in Colombia and Mexico, and warns that “militarized operations put civilian populations at elevated risk of being caught in the crossfire as both sides — the state and organized crime — seek to escalate the conflict.”

Walsh sees Ecuador’s crisis as a regional and international problem, inextricably tied to the global cocaine market. Ecuador has already been transformed. The widespread, coordinated violence and brazen show of force by the country’s gangs this week reveal that Ecuador has already become a new epicenter for drug cartel violence and conflict.

The violence is “starting to be normalized,” says Chacón, the former vice mayor of Quito. “There is this feeling of hopelessness, that the situation will not change.”

Noboa’s declaration of an “internal armed conflict” signals the same militarized approach that failed to stem cartel violence in Mexico and Colombia. Experts say Ecuador needs to first address the systemic corruption and infiltration of state institutions that have allowed gangs to amass their power. And really, Walsh says, a new regional approach that addresses the international nature of narcotrafficking is needed to ensure Ecuador does not continue down the path of spiraling violence that has destabilized its neighbors — including rethinking drug prohibition altogether.

“We need to see this as a tragedy that’s not likely to limit itself to Ecuador but may also already be spreading,” Walsh says. “There’s no reason to think Ecuador is where this ends.”

“That should be an extremely sobering thought,” he adds. “And rather than trying to counteract these developments with the tools and strategies that have failed disastrously in the past, we need new ways of thinking and in particular to challenge drug prohibition as an enabler of the organized crime and corruption that we are supposedly trying to tackle.”

Burnt radio stations and 18-month newsprint blockades: Inside the slow culling of Nicaragua’s free press

2020-02-20T17:06:03-05:00

In January 2019, La Prensa ran a front page totally blank — except for the question, “Have you imagined living without information?” — in protest against the refusal by the General Directorate of Customs (DGA) to hand over paper and ink imported by the paper. | Inti Ocon/AFP via Getty Images

Most repressive countries interested in censoring information and the media try to lock down the internet, but for the past two years, Nicaragua has had an old-school solution: just remove the tools of the trade.

Police have seized a TV station’s broadcast facility, government supporters have burned down radio stations, and for nearly the last year and a half, customs officials have blockaded shipments of newsprint and ink for print newspapers. This month, that last restriction, at least, was finally lifted.

President Daniel Ortega’s administration released the impounded materials two weeks ago, loosening its grip on the independent press just enough so that the country’s paper of record, La Prensa, can avoid shutting down. The country’s other dailies haven’t been so lucky.

Since August 2018, La Prensa’s daily print edition has slowly shrunk from 32 pages to eight, before they finally had to switch to printing the shorter issue on regular, locally available — and more expensive — paper.

“The blockage on the press and on press freedom has been opened,” La Prensa director Jaime Chamorro said two weeks ago at a press conference as the materials arrived. “I think this is a good sign, not just for other media outlets that have been closed but also for the opening up of Nicaragua.”

The paper, which has been the daily staple of Nicaraguan news since its founding in the 1920s, received no explanation for why the materials were being released now, Chamorro said. The Nicaraguan customs office declined to comment.

“I think it benefitted [the government] too, not just us,” Chamorro said after suggesting the paper’s pressure campaign might have finally helped end the blockade. “Because imagine it, if La Prensa had been closed down, we would have been the first country in the world without a print newspaper.”

It’s another sign that Ortega’s administration is trying to quietly restore normalcy to the country after nearly two years of heightened repression — without admitting any wrongdoing. After winning reelection in 2006, Ortega implemented several social programs, such as his “Zero Hunger” initiative, that benefited many. But he and his now vice president-cum-first lady Rosario Murillo have also consolidated power over the courts and Supreme Electoral Council, removed constitutional term limits, and restricted the independent media’s access to official government sources.

That all came to a head in April of 2018, when state security forces’ violent suppression of protests transformed a narrow complaint about proposed social security reforms into a broad anti-government movement. The months of ensuing civil uprising — and the government’s response — culminated with over 300 dead, a hamstrung economy, and a country deeply divided over issues of free speech and government abuses.

Today, Nicaragua is aggressively trying to project an air of normalcy, courting the tourists who fled. And, to an extent, the country has succeeded. 2018’s ubiquitous protest graffiti is white-washed over; 20-somethings shout to be heard in packed nightclubs that were barricaded shut during the crisis; and some well-known political activists are even returning from self-imposed exile.

This month’s decision, brokered by the Vatican’s top diplomat in Nicaragua, comes just weeks after the storied outlet published an editorial hinting it might have to close.

The once-national paper had to cut staff and limit distribution to just the capital of Managua and one or two other provinces, said Eduardo Enríquez, La Prensa’s long-time managing editor.

“We were a hundred journalists before April [when the crisis began], and now we’re less than 30; the business has been hit hard,” he said at the press conference this month.

La Prensa’s staff had continued publishing online for their 2 million unique monthly visitors, distributing on WhatsApp, and producing other multimedia content. In fact, the digital team won the Inter-American Press Association’s Excellence in Journalism award for its coverage of the 2018 crisis. But for many readers, it’s newsprint or nothing.

“[T]here is a big part of the population that likes to read the paper every morning,” Enríquez told Vox last fall. “Some people, if we don’t put it in the paper, they feel like we haven’t talked about it or published anything about it.”

La Prensa, owned by members of the same Chamorro family that has included leaders of opposition political parties, is a vocal critic of Ortega. Its editorial line for years was to call him the “unconstitutional president,” starting when he ran for a then-unconstitutional third term in 2011. Thankfully, Enríquez said, its journalists weren’t individually targeted during the crisis as some journalists were.

President Donald Trump’s administration, which has kept up pressure on Managua as part of a broader effort to target socialist Latin American countries, celebrated the release of the newsprint. Michael Kozak, the State Department’s acting assistant secretary for the Western Hemisphere, tweeted his support — and a call for the return of “property confiscated from other independent outlets.”

The long-overdue decision to release @laprensa’s paper & ink from Nicaraguan customs is a step in the right direction.

Now Ortega should return property confiscated from other independent outlets like @confidencial_ni and @100noticiasni. Freedom of expression is a #HumanRight.
— Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs (@WHAAsstSecty) February 7, 2020

Nicaragua’s stance toward the independent press is still adversarial, however, and Murillo —as chief of communications — keeps a tight grip on government information.

“Nothing happens here without Ortego or Rosario authorizing it,” Enríquez told Vox. “Their supporters say, ‘If the comandante knew about this,’ but he knows, and she knows.”

The last two years have been rough for Nicaraguan journalists

It’s not only La Prensa that nearly stopped printing, or the other two daily papers who were run out of the print business; a wave of independent and opposition outlets have been forced to close their doors in Nicaragua.

The environment for journalists took a nosedive as the country’s civil crisis broke out in April 2018. According to an annual global report by Article 19, Nicaragua had one of the largest drops in press freedom from 2017 to ’18.

Some outlets the administration didn’t need to target. They were the victims of the generalized anti-media climate the administration created. Taking a page out of the book used by Trump and authoritarians everywhere, state journalists and officials regularly called critical journalists and reporters covering protests “traitors” and “golpistas” (coup-plotters).

Henry Blanco, a 30-year-old street reporter for Radio Darío, an independent station in the city of León, told Vox last year that “you could never practice journalism completely freely … but everything became more complicated in April 2018.”

As protests broke out that month, Blanco witnessed state repression against both demonstrators and reporters rapidly escalate: “on April 20 … we began seeing videos of journalists being attacked.” It was a chaotic scene, with both pro- and anti-government protestors targeting media.

While Blanco sat in Radio Darío’s transmitting booth on the 20th, relaying reports that another station, the pro-government Tu Nueva Radio Ya, had been burned down by protesters, the station received an anonymous call promising violence against his team of reporters by sundown.

Shortly thereafter, another call — this time from a head of the governing party — made the threat even more explicit, telling reporters in the station that, if they did not stop broadcasting about government violence over the air, they would be killed.

At 7:25 pm, as some of Radio Darío’s team sat down to eat a quick working dinner in the office, they heard a gunshot blast open the lock on the station’s front door, then an explosion. “Suddenly,” Blanco said, “the [recording] booth was ablaze.”

Trapped in the burning station, and worried that beyond the front entrance were men armed with guns, Blanco remembers that some of his colleagues were so paralyzed by fear they “couldn’t do anything but cry.”

Blanco and his colleagues narrowly escaped through a backdoor, but no firefighters or police answered their calls. The group of reporters watched their station burn to the ground.

The terrorizing of the press didn’t end when Ortega reconsolidated power that summer.

In December of that year, two independent stations who’d criticized the government and amplified live videos of violence in the streets, Confidencial and 100% Noticias, were raided by the police, who seized equipment and prevented journalists from reentering the premises.

“I wanted to go film it,” Lucía Pineda, news director of the still-shuttered 100% Noticias, told Vox, recalling when she learned the station had been seized. “But police suddenly opened the door to our office and I ran down the stairs and hid under the staircase and there broadcast my final report, that the police had taken control of the station.”

She and the station’s director Miguel Mora were jailed for nearly six months, on charges of “inciting violence and hate” and “promoting terrorism.” They’ve been released, and the station’s journalists continue to broadcast online. But the channel’s offices are still shuttered, under the state’s control.

And even the newly liberated La Prensa says it’s going to have to “study” how and when to reexpand its print edition — though its leaders vowed to continue practicing its critical journalism that speaks truth to power: “La Prensa has been doing that for 93 years, it’s not going to change,” Enríquez said.

But one critical paper does not a robust, independent press make.

“The channel 100% Noticias must be returned to its owners and Confidencial must be allowed to return to their offices” he continued. “Other media outlets are still in trouble, and we, as independent media, still have no access to government information. … All this has to open up before we can even begin to think that there is freedom of the press, freedom of expression and access to information.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the Justice for Journalists Foundation.

Correction: Tu Nueva Radio Ya was a pro-government station, which was burned by protesters.