2024-01-13 07:28:01
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s two main drug cartels have long carried their deadly rivalry wherever they go as they expand into far-flung markets, from Asia to Australia to Africa, but never before with the intensity of violence. street violence and a presidential declaration of a state of “internal armed conflict” like those that occurred this week in Ecuador.
Gunmen from an Ecuadorian gang believed to be related to the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel broke into a television station during a live broadcast and displayed explosives. For its part, a rival group that would be backed by the Sinaloa cartel called for peace in a statement apparently issued from Mexico City.
But why are the Mexican cartels in Ecuador? Because of the location. And for the bananas.
Ecuador is attractive as a starting point for the drug due to its location between the two main cocaine producers: Colombia and Peru. Ecuador has been hit by poverty, the COVID-19 pandemic, the weakness of its security forces and corruption, but it also has important, and legitimate, foreign trade.
The ships leave from there to the United States and Europe with huge containers of bananas — a fruit of which the country is the world’s largest exporter — on board, and these are good hiding places for cocaine.
“There is a confluence of factors and, yes, there are bananas, a huge number of containers and establishments and covers for smuggling all over the world, in Europe, from Europe to Turkey and other parts of the world,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown , senior fellow at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution.
In a few years, according to experts, the experience and muscle of the Mexican cartels have turned Ecuador into the shipping port for almost a third of all cocaine entering Europe.
According to a 2023 report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “the proportion of cocaine reported to the Western European Regional Intelligence Office with Ecuador identified as a starting point rose from 14% in 2018 to 29% in 2020 and 28% in 2021.”
Much of the cocaine was linked to Mexican cartels, which moved to producing countries like Colombia following peace deals signed there in 2016 with leftist rebels. Colombian coca leaf fields have moved increasingly closer to the border with Ecuador due to the fragmentation of criminal groups following the demobilization of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that same year.
In Mexico, from where the cartels mainly send fentanyl and methamphetamine to the United States, the battle between Sinaloa and Jalisco has caused a persistent wave of violence that has lasted for a decade.
Something similar can be seen in Ecuador, but at a surprisingly fast pace. The country’s homicide rate soared from regarding six per 100,000 people in 2016 — comparable to the United States — to regarding 40 per 100,000 last year.
The business model of Mexican cartels abroad is practically a copy of the local one: ensuring control of an area by recruiting local gangs with offers of weapons and cash. Then, fight mercilessly once morest the rival cartel for control of the territory.
“The Jalisco or Sinaloa cartels insist that local criminal groups choose between them, that they are either with one or the other, and they act with violence once morest rival groups that choose another option,” said Felbab-Brown.
“This has happened in Ecuador,” he added.
The problem worsened when Mexican cartels stopped paying local gangs in cash and began paying them in drugs, said Fernando Carrión, a political science professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Ecuador.
Local groups “have to sell these drugs in local markets, and that forces them to organize, increases local consumption (of drugs) and laundering and, for this reason, violence also increases,” Carrión added, pointing out that the Territorial fights over street vending increase homicide rates.
That is why Mexican cartels do not send their own troops or armored vehicles to Ecuador: it is the Ecuadorians who take charge, in what Carrión describes as a form of outsourcing.
“They connect with other organizations in an outsourcing scheme,” he stated, adding that Sinaloa is connected to the ‘Choneros’, one of the oldest gangs in the country.
Jalisco Nueva Generación, for its part, is with the Lobos who, like them, is a recently created group, he added. Jalisco also appears to work with the Tiguerones, the gang that attacked the television station this week. “In this subcontracting scheme, these (local) groups perform certain tasks,” Carrión said, such as surveillance or transporting cocaine shipments by land to ports.
The power of local gangs is terrifying and extends from prisons to the streets.
Presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated in August less than two weeks before the election. He had reported threats from Choneros. A couple of months later, six suspects in his death, all of them Colombians, died in prison.
Last Sunday, the leader of the Choneros, Adolfo Macías, disappeared from the prison where he was being held. Since his apparent escape, gangs have kidnapped police officers and inmates have taken at least 178 prison officers hostage.
On Tuesday, following the takeover of the television station, the country’s president, Daniel Noboa, designated 20 drug trafficking gangs as terrorist groups and authorized the army to “neutralize” them. But he remains to see whether the government can regain control.
Ecuador is not alone. Nations as far away as New Zealand and Australia have seen an uptick in violence following the arrival of Mexican cartels.
According to a 2016 report from the Australian Center for Strategic and Defense Studies, prepared by Dr. Anthea McCarthy-Jones, in the country, “the emergence of Mexican drug cartels in local markets presents challenges not only criminal but also strategic”.
“Their presence threatens not only to increase the supply of illegal drugs in Australia, but also to foment turf wars, increase the number of weapons in the country, monopolize security resources and threaten the stability and good governance of transit points. in the South Pacific,” the report stated.
Felbab-Brown also noted that the violence incited by Mexican cartels threatens nations that were previously considered peaceful. Ecuador itself had presented itself in recent years as a safe haven for American retirees.
“The aggressions and the bipolar war, and the voracity of the Mexican cartels are having disastrous effects throughout America. It blows up markets that for many years were considered safe havens, islands of stability and peace, like Costa Rica or Chile,” he added.
“Right now Ecuador is the epicenter of violence, there is blatant dramatic behavior, intimidation and aggression from local criminal groups, so it is at the forefront, but the role of the Mexican cartels has been pernicious south of Chiapas (in the Mexican border with Guatemala) and throughout the continent,” he said.
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