The U.S. will support the fight against drug trafficking by granting Ecuador military equipment in exchange for the delivery of Russian equipment to Ukraine.

Ecuadorian Armed Forces Arrest 329 Terrorists and Kill 5

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Ecuador Declares War on Gang Violence

Ecuador in crisis: five points to understand a country broken by neoliberalism

However, the shocking and unprecedented episode on the public channel in Guayaquil—and the events that preceded and followed it—are just the latest chapter in a spiral of organized violence that has lasted for about five years and that has metastasized in the last two. It is the sad metamorphosis of a country that went from being the second safest in Latin America to becoming the most violent, with a homicide rate that has grown almost 800% since 2019.

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1-The international factor. Ecuador is located in the middle of Colombia and Peru, the world’s largest producers of cocaine. The presence of the FARC in southern Colombia functioned as a kind of blockade for the expansion of the cartels towards Ecuador, but the signing of the peace agreement in 2016, and the subsequent demobilization of the guerrilla, deconfigured that border territory and opened the floodgate to the criminal economy to establish its operations, mainly in the ports of Guayaquil and Esmeraldas.

Furthermore, within the framework of a reconfiguration of drug routes, Ecuador became a large regional center for the storage, processing and distribution of drugs destined mainly for the United States and Europe. In a short time, more than twenty gangs proliferated, operating in a fragmented manner, in many cases as subcontractors of the large cartels of Mexico and Colombia.

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5- A regional plan. The plot that is destroying Ecuador has local particularities but responds to a model that was firmly established in the 1980s in Mexico, Colombia and some Central American countries, and that in recent years has spread, on different scales, throughout the region. It is about the paramilitarization of territories to sow terror, dismantle the social fabric and keep the populations subjugated, while in parallel a structure of millionaire businesses is rebuilt. Old and new strategies of domination to continue guaranteeing control of the Latin American landscape.

Whose businesses will control Latin America, though?! 🤔