BOGOTÁ, Colombia — When Europe’s busiest port recently announced the discovery of nearly 9 tons of cocaine hidden in a shipment of bananas — its biggest-ever seizure of illegal narcotics — it included a detail that was no longer surprising. The shipment had come not from Colombia or Peru, Latin America’s largest cocaine producers, but from Ecuador, the small nation sandwiched between them.
Ecuador has struggled for years with drug trafficking because of its geographic location, fairly porous borders and major Pacific Ocean ports.
But in recent years, the situation has gotten much worse.
An overcrowded, corrupt and poorly financed penal system has become a breeding ground for prison gangs that have formed alliances with powerful drug cartels from abroad.
These ingredients that have helped make Ecuador an increasingly major player in the global drug trade have also unleashed an extraordinary wave of violence, transforming life for millions of everyday Ecuadorians.
Now it has drawn an international spotlight with the assassination last week of a presidential candidate just as the country prepares to vote Sunday.
The candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, had repeatedly warned of links between drug gangs and government officials and politicians, and days before his assassination had spoken publicly about threats from a local criminal group.
His killing has left the country of 18 million reeling, helping make security a top concern among voters and leaving many Ecuadorians wondering how their country, once a relatively peaceful oasis in a turbulent region, became a battleground and a place where a politician could be killed in broad daylight.
The roots of Ecuador’s travails lie largely in a shifting drug market and a government ill-equipped to handle it.
Ecuador’s homicide rate actually dropped under a former president, Rafael Correa, who governed from 2007 to 2017, through increased policing and a commodities boom that helped lift millions out of poverty.
But Correa, in 2009, also decided not to extend the lease for a U.S. military base in the port city of Manta used to fly planes to interdict drugs, and he cut ties with the U.S. State Department’s international narcotics agency.
The expulsion of U.S. forces hampered Ecuador’s ability to control its northern border with Colombia and eased the distribution of drugs in the country, according to a former Ecuadorian counterterrorism and anti-narcotics officer who asked not to be identified because he was returning to government service.
Correa’s successor, Lenín Moreno, prioritized paying off the country’s foreign debt and imposed austerity measures and budget cuts that further weakened the nation’s security apparatus.
He eliminated government agencies, including the justice ministry, and slashed spending on policing and prisons, sectors seen as “expendable” in a country that had long been peaceful, according to Glaeldys González, who researches Ecuador for the International Crisis Group.
In neighboring Colombia, the government signed a landmark peace agreement in 2016 with the country’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which controlled much of the drug trade.
When the group disarmed, it cracked open the narcotrafficking business and led to new groups and routes, González said.
Some factions in FARC that refused to sign the accord moved their business to Ecuador, where they could continue operating away from the watchful eye of the Colombian government.
Ecuador had long been a transit hub for drugs coming from Colombia and Peru, but after 2016, local groups became involved in manufacturing and distribution, joining forces with Mexican and even Albanian cartels.
Within three years, Ecuador had became the top exporter of cocaine to Europe, according to a European drug monitoring agency, where the use of the drug has been rising.
Just last week, Netherlands announced the record seizure in Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port, of cocaine from Ecuador worth $660 million.
Domestic and foreign groups took advantage of a country whose ability to take on narcotrafficking had been undermined by the cuts to the police and military, a weak justice system and a penal system largely run by gangs.
An economy that uses dollars as the local currency and weak financial controls also made it easier to launder drug money.
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