Ecuadorian Armed Forces showcases the seizures of firearms and ammunition in an operation in the coastal village of Posorja, Quayas province, September 5, 2024. (Photo: Ecuadorian Armed Forces/X)
In less than 10 years, Ecuador went from being the second safest country in Latin America to the most violent in the region. According to the annual Bulletin of Intentional Homicides of the Ecuadorian Observatory of Organized Crime (OECO), in 2023, with an average of 47.25 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, Ecuador was among the 10 countries in the world with the highest incidence of crime. Narcotrafficking has been among the decisive factors in this transformation.
For María Paula Romo Rodríguez, Ecuador’s former Interior Minister (2018-2020), now a research associate at Florida International University, “until a few years ago, the criminal narcotrafficking industry was the most important in the country, but today it’s a mistake to make a diagnosis focused on it,” she told Diálogo. “Criminal activities have expanded and diversified, and among the most important ones we should consider are illegal mining, human trafficking, illegal logging, species trafficking, and, in terms of affecting a large percentage of the population, extortion.”
According to Romo, the reasons for this security crisis that threatens the entire region are many. The increase in poverty and unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic, bad public policy decisions, corruption, and problems derived from the demobilization of armed groups in Colombia have also played an important role in the advance of criminality.
“In the neighboring country, the number of hectares planted with coca has multiplied, and meanwhile Ecuador has subsidized precursors such as gasoline, roads, ports, airports, and a dollarized financial system” that attracted criminals, Romo said.
The exponential growth of the illegal arms market is among the most serious consequence of all these illicit activities. According to the 2020 Global Organized Crime Index of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), arms trafficking is considered the most prevalent criminal market in Ecuador, putting the country in a “highly vulnerable space.”
“What we see in Ecuador is that there are increasingly more powerful weapons on the market to ensure greater protection for criminal groups involved in narcotrafficking or mining, for example. In the case of mining, the groups that control it have to be armed to be able to intimidate the communities and to be able to effectively evict them,” Carla Álvarez, professor at Ecuador’s Institute for Advanced National Studies and author of Paradise Lost? Firearms trafficking and violence in Ecuador, published jointly in June by GI-TOC and the OECO.
Foreign criminal groups’ weapons
In an operation around Ishpingo, Orellana province, the Ecuadorian Armed Forces seized 13 barrels of diesel, on September 7, 2024. (Photo: Ecuadorian Armed Forces/X)
Ecuador is not an industrial arms producer. In 2012, as part of measures to curb the increasing violence, the Ecuadorian government banned the artisanal manufacturing of firearms throughout the country, yet many small workshops opted for clandestine production, especially in the Chimborazo and Bolívar regions.
However, in the last two years, experts and authorities have also registered an increase of industrial weapons in the illegal market, due to the rise of foreign criminal groups in the territory, such as Mexican cartels and Albanian mafias.
“These international groups have easy access to weapons. The novelty is that there is a direct relationship between them and Ecuadorian criminal groups. Each group weaves its own relationship. For example, a local group like Los Lobos has a relationship with a Mexican cartel and this cartel supplies them directly with weapons. There is no middleman or trafficker who comes to Ecuador and distributes arms to the different groups, but rather each group monopolizes its own arms supply,” Álvarez said.
Ecuador is primarily home to the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation (CJNG) cartels, which, according to the Mexican government, traffics hundreds of thousands of weapons into Mexico that are also diverted to Ecuador, where these cartels operate. According to local authorities, these weapons are exchanged for drugs, money, and even information with local criminal organizations such as Los Choneros, Los Lobos, and Los Tiguerones.
As for the Albanian criminals, who in Ecuador work mainly for the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta mafia, Italian prosecutor Nicola Gratteri warned that weapons used in the Ukrainian conflict could soon end up in Latin America as well.
According to Álvarez, the air and maritime routes of arms trafficking from Central America to Ecuador intersect with those of drug trafficking. In November 2023 in the Galápagos Islands, for instance, police made the largest arms seizure in Ecuador’s history: 122 assault rifles, 48 pistols, and 124 magazines. More recently, in August 2024, Salvadoran authorities seized 1.2 tons of cocaine, ammunition, and 34 large-caliber weapons, including AR-15 and AK 47 rifles, aboard a Mexican and an Ecuadorian vessel.
By land, the weapons arrive from Colombia and Peru. In March 2023, a criminal network called Los Abastecedores de Lima y Callao (The Lima and Callao Suppliers) was discovered on the Peruvian border between Piura and Tumbes, specializing in this type of trafficking. According to news agency France Press, Peruvian authorities suspected that this same network supplied one of the weapons that killed Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio in Quito, in August 2023.
“The lack of controls on arms trafficking in other countries facilitates larger and more direct arms flows, which allows criminal groups to gain power in Ecuador,” Álvarez said.
International cooperation
Authorities arrested three men and seized several firearms and ammunition in an operation in Salitre, Guayas province, on August 23, 2024. (Photo: Ecuadorian Armed Forces/X)
International collaboration “is vital, and the current situation is also explained by the years in which this collaboration and work was lost. Collaboration with the United States can be crucial in various sectors such as criminal intelligence, information exchange, investigation, and investigative techniques, and the professionalization of security forces,” Romo said.
As the Ecuadorian government called for international help in its war against organized crime, the United States was among the countries to swiftly respond. In January 2024, for instance, during her visit to Ecuador, U.S. Army General Laura J. Richardson, commander of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), announced the Ecuador Security Sector Assistance Roadmap, or ESSAR, a five-year plan that outlines the United States and Ecuador’s shared security priorities.
“We already have a very solid investment portfolio with Ecuador […]. And it’s about cooperation between military forces, between SOUTHCOM and the Ecuadorian Armed Forces,” Gen. Richardson told Ecuadorian daily Primicias in a January interview. “Our portfolio is worth $93.4 million and includes, not only military equipment transfer, but also humanitarian assistance and disaster response, professional military education. It also includes cyber assistance training and special forces exchange.”
For Álvarez, international collaboration on the arms issue is also important for Ecuador. “Ecuador needs foreign technology, and in that area, there could be the right cooperation on tracing,” she said.
Considering the central role of firearms in the increase in violence in the country, reducing their illegal possession, diversion, and trafficking is critical to ultimately thwart organized crime, she concluded.
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Publish date : 2024-10-02 23:01:00
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