Ecuador Violence Underscores Expansion of Mexican Cartels

Soldiers patrol outside the government palace during a state of emergency in Quito, Ecuador, on Jan. 9, 2024. Dolores Ochoa/AP Photo

A startling escalation of violence by criminal gangs in Ecuador last week has triggered a crackdown against the rapidly expanding cartel activity in the small South American nation.

After a group of armed men overwhelmed a television studio in Guayaquil during a Jan. 9 live broadcast, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa quickly declared an “internal armed conflict” against 22 transnational terrorist groups and local drug gangs.

An emergency meeting of the Legislative Administration Council of the National Assembly voted in support of Mr. Noboa’s measure that granted Ecuador’s security forces the use of deadly force as necessary to stem the tidal wave of gang violence that’s rocking the country.

“We are going to fight effectively against crime and terrorists,” Mr. Noboa said in a video posted on his X account on Jan. 11. The head of state further assured listeners that his administration will stop those who seek to turn Ecuador “to chaos.”

Even as soldiers began patrolling the streets of Ecuadorian cities, new reports emerged on Jan. 12 of a bomb threat in the nation’s capital, Quito; while a nightclub was burned down in the Amazonian city of Coca, killing at least two people.

The recent spike in gang violence has been widely attributed to the escape of drug lord Adolfo Macías, also known as “Fito,” from a Guayaquil prison on about Jan. 7.

However, regional analysts say Ecuador has been on this path for years and that anti-U.S. regimes such as China, Cuba, and Venezuela stand to benefit from the deepening chaos.

A masked, armed person standing over journalists during a live broadcast in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on Jan. 9, 2024. TC Television network via AP

Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat, author and coordinator of the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance, said the criminal violence in Ecuador is a windfall for the “axis of evil” regimes in Latin America.

He told The Epoch Times that the regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua all have a “vested interest in the subversion and take over of Ecuador” and that the current “criminal rampage” in the country furthers this goal.

Mr. Gutiérrez-Boronat predicts the conflict between Ecuador’s current administration and the gangs will get worse before the government regains control. “Ecuador must reengage in security cooperation with the U.S. and EU,” he said.

In 2008, then-populist Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa ended the agreement with a U.S. military base in the city of Manta, which sits on the Pacific coast.

The base in Manta had supported “over 1,150 counternarcotics missions in 2007 by providing logistical support for U.S. aircraft that detect and monitor narcotics trafficking,” according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report from July 2008.

A U.S. trade report also states that in early 2009, the Ecuadorian government acted to “end U.S. cooperation with specialized police units and expel key members of the U.S. Mission.”

The report states that the moves “negatively affected some of our traditionally close cooperation to stop narcotrafficking and other transnational crimes.”

Mr. Gutiérrez-Boronat said that Mr. Correa introduced “lawlessness” as a means of political control in Ecuador, which was compounded by the expulsion of U.S. security forces.

Some believe the subsequent lack of a larger security presence gave Ecuador’s drug trafficking industry a major boost.

In a shift back to the United States, in August 2023, officials from Ecuador and the United States signed a 10-year agreement in which the two nations “extended and expanded cooperation on strengthening the capacity of law enforcement and the justice sector to combat transnational organized crime.”

The U.S. Department of State on Jan. 11 condemned the recent violence in Ecuador and pledged to “deepen” its law enforcement cooperation.

“Since January 9, Ecuador has experienced appalling levels of violence and terrorism at the hands of narco-criminal elements targeting innocent civilians,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.

Beyond authoritarian governments in Latin America, other anti-U.S. regimes are poised to benefit from the explosion of gang violence and narcotics trafficking in Ecuador.

“Iran, Russia, and China-backed regimes want to see nothing more than other puppet regimes and ideological allies spring up once social order is challenged in neighboring countries,” security analyst and president of Scarab Rising, Irina Tsukerman, told The Epoch Times.

She said Ecuador is one of the “foremost countries” in the region that’s swiftly gravitating toward Beijing’s sphere of influence.

“Beijing’s goal is not destabilization and chaos for its own sake, but rather specific political and economic outcomes from existing governments favorable to its interests. Riots and populism are leverage, not the end goal,” Ms. Tsukerman said.

“The end goal is to consolidate control as much as possible and turn Ecuador into an extension of its interests in Latin America—a new base.”

She believes that if Ecuador spirals too far into gang violence and chaos, China will stop benefiting due to its sizable investments in the country. But it could pay off for Russia, she noted.

Unlike China, Russia wants “chaos for the sake of chaos as part of its larger strategy to destabilize Latin America, exploit local factions, and turn the region into a major headache for the U.S. and possibly a convenient place for all sorts of criminal activity ... even future attacks on U.S. interests,” Ms. Tsukerman said.

She said “complete lawlessness” in Ecuador supports Russia’s overall interests in the region.

Domino Effect

Despite holding the title “island of peace” in the middle of South America’s largest narco-trafficking region, Evan Ellis, a regional analyst and professor at the U.S. Army War College, said Ecuador’s current chaos was a predictable outcome.

“Ecuador serving as a relative island of security between the two biggest cocaine producers was always unsustainable,” Mr. Ellis told The Epoch Times.

Roughly the size of the state of Colorado, Ecuador is sandwiched between Colombia and Peru. Owing to its deepwater ports in cities such as Guayaquil and Esmeraldas, Mr. Ellis noted Ecuador has always been attractive to crime syndicates trafficking cocaine via sea routes to the United States or Asia.

One analysis by Insight Crime states that a significant catalyst for Ecuador’s current escalation of gang violence was the death of narco kingpin Jorge Luis Zambrano González in 2020. Known in the streets as Rasquiña, he’s been credited with expanding Ecuador’s largest and most notorious drug gang, Los Choneros.

Rasquiña’s public murder in a shopping complex on Dec. 28, 2020, created a power vacuum among existing and aspiring narco-trafficking groups. The formerly unified Los Choneros splintered into rival gangs, which opened the door for greater foreign cartel penetration, such as Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación. Both cartels have been consolidating control over drug trafficking routes out of Ecuador.

The current head of Los Choneros, “Fito” is the criminal who reportedly escaped custody last week. The Epoch Times reached out to Ecuadorian national police to verify reports of the escape but didn’t receive a response.

The pandemic also contributed to the problem. It presented another expansion opportunity for rival gangs jockeying for power while the administration of then-President Guillermo Lasso struggled with a national health emergency.

“COVID-19 kind of froze everything,” Mr. Ellis said. He thinks Mr. Lasso responded to the simultaneous national challenges in “clumsy ways” that didn’t address the country’s rapidly evolving security crisis.

In this file photo taken in 2001, guerrillas of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) march in a military parade in San Vicente, Colombia. Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images

Combined with the shake-up in Colombia’s criminal equilibrium, “it was really one of those great opportunities that everyone rushed into,” Mr. Ellis said.

And with the criminal power struggle came higher rates of violence.

Ecuador is now one of the three most violent countries in Latin America, after Venezuela and Honduras, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

The nation’s homicide rate jumped to 45 people per 100,000 in 2023, the report states. In 2021, the rate was 13.7 per 100,000 people.

The Poverty Factor

A deepening slide into poverty underscores Ecuador’s current crusade against narcotics trafficking.

The past six years marked a spike in poverty levels, which is a “root cause” of the nation’s soaring gang violence, according to a U.N. report.

An estimated 38 percent of Ecuador’s population lives in poverty, according to the report. In rural areas, the rate climbs to 70 percent.

“A lack of job opportunities and poor education have made young people easy recruits for criminal gangs,” Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, wrote in the report.

“And these gangs are in turn fuelling poverty by extorting small businesses, taking hold in schools and disrupting children’s education, and creating such fear and despair that a growing number of Ecuadorians are simply leaving the country.”

The number of youth murders in areas with the highest reported gang crime in Ecuador rose sharply in 2022 and 2023, according to a report by Insight Crime. Local security forces suspect recruitment by local drug gangs, which offer a solution to poverty in areas with limited opportunities.

In one incident, a 16-year-old and a 19-year-old murdered an anti-narcotics police officer in the city of Guayaquil in October 2023.

“You have these areas that just have a complete lack of opportunities. ... Then these kids think to themselves, growing up, ‘Well, who has all the money and the nice shoes and things?’” Mr. Ellis said.

He said cartels have long used minors as operatives; it’s a go-to tactic with the potential to make Ecuador’s security situation a “whole lot bloodier.”

Mr. Gutiérrez-Boronat said cartels focus on minors as child soldiers because they’re “easy to manipulate and expendable.”

Ms. Tsukerman agrees.

“Cartels, just as much as terrorist organizations, target young people, even children, for recruitment, indoctrination, and use in its operations,” she said.

“The reasons for that are, first, minors are expendable and can be used as cannon fodder in the front lines of conflict; second, for strategic reasons, having minors involved in conflict could give pause to government forces and avoid deadly confrontation.”