Although much of the focus of the global news cycle remains on the Middle East, today I turn to a country that is much closer to the United States – Ecuador. Until a few years ago, Ecuador was regarded as the gold standard for peace and prosperity among the northern Andean countries. Unlike its neighbor Colombia, Ecuador had faced little threat from cartels, paramilitaries or guerrilla groups. However, as Colombia has slowly moved toward peace, Ecuador has very quickly spiraled away from it.
The origins of Ecuador’s abrupt horror story occurred during the coronavirus pandemic. Around this time, cartels operating in Colombia, who tend to grow their coca in regions close to the Ecuadorian border, were transitioning increasingly to transporting their crops through Ecuador. Although this may initially seem like the wrong direction, as Ecuador is south of Colombia, Ecuador boasts many major ports such as Guayaquil. These ports make the transit of drugs, disguised among bananas and other goods, much easier. Additionally, Ecuador’s official currency is the U.S. dollar, making transactions simpler as well.
Since Ecuador had not dealt with nearly as much violence as its neighbors, there was an understandable level of complacency regarding security. This lack of security was most evident within Ecuadorian prisons, which effectively became operational headquarters for some of the criminal organizations that had members detained inside. Meanwhile, outside of the prisons, the murder rate quintupled.
This trend became quite apparent when presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was murdered on Aug. 9 of last year. Fast forwarding to this past January, Los Choneros gang leader Jose Adolfo “Fito” Macias escaped from prison, highlighting the lawless state of Ecuadorian prisons. In the same city, masked gunmen interrupted a live broadcast on a public television channel. Not long after, the prosecutor charged with investigating that attack, Cesar Suarez, was assassinated in Guayaquil.
As a result of these events and other acts of violence, President Daniel Noboa declared a state of “internal armed conflict” in Ecuador, setting a curfew and authorizing the military to take on an expanded police role in the state, conducting active operations against cartels.
Although I am hardly the first to say this, the United States plays an outsized role in this conflict. This is from more than just providing demand for drugs: American guns are responsible for a severe number of fatalities abroad – especially now in Ecuador. The gangs and cartels operating in Ecuador get most of their weapons from Mexico, who in turn get most of their arsenal illegally from the United States. I have made a point in a previous piece about how although many of these guns are acquired illegally, they exist in the first place because of the size of demand for guns. Furthermore, almost every weapon acquired illegally was, at some point, legal. Law enforcement generally fails to prevent guns that were once legal from becoming illegal and being trafficked across borders. It is understandably hard to track individual items once they leave factories and stores and are dispersed among the private population.
My goal with this piece is not to advocate a specific policy, but to point out the prevalence of guns in the Americas is due to U.S. arms manufacturers responding to demand for their product. This is from both legal demand as well as demand that is, indirectly down the consumer chain, illegal. The prevalence of guns means some will eventually get illegally transferred to criminal organizations in Latin America. Thus, if the American demand for guns was not so large, many criminal organizations in Latin America would never have become entities capable of waging violence successfully against their governments and people.
