Ecuador, despite not being a large producer, is an important transit port for cocaine that leaves Colombia and Peru.EFE
In the warehouses of the Ministry of the Interior of Ecuador, the seized drugs enter faster than they can be destroyed.
In 2021, the Anti-Drug Police seized 210 tons of illicit substances, and by September 2022, they had only managed to get rid of less than half.
The collection centers collapsed with another 200 tons that were seized in different operations that same year, which represented a risk to the security of the custodians, who were targets of attacks by criminal groups that tried to recover the merchandise.
The answer to what to do with so much cocaine was found in the encapsulation method, in which the drug is destroyed and mixed until it becomes concrete blocks.
The South American country is experiencing a security crisis as it is used as a platform for drug trafficking by Mexican cartels and faces the challenge of quickly eliminating the hundreds of tons of seized substances to prevent their reinsertion into the illicit market.
The traditional method used by the Ecuadorian Government was that of incineration;
however, it failed to destroy large numbers.
"Incinerating 70 kilos of cocaine hydrochloride takes approximately one hour, due to the chemical conditions of the drug," explains Edmundo Mera, Undersecretary for Controlled Substances of the Ministry of the Interior.
While with the encapsulation method up to 1.8 tons can be destroyed in the same time, that amount in the furnace would take two weeks, "it is 270 times faster," says Mera.
Thus, of the 450 tons of drugs destroyed in the last two years, 369 have been done by encapsulation, which is included in the protocols of the United Nations Drug Office and that Ecuador has adapted to carry it out on a large scale.
The encapsulation method consists of pulverizing the drugs, then it enters an industrial mixer where it is mixed with cement, lime, waste of all kinds, such as expired medicine, with a binder and hardness additive, the result of the mixture is concrete, "which it is dumped in security cells”, explains Mera.
It is a 15-meter-deep pool, “which is covered with a geomembrane, which is compacted in two hours,” she adds, and it would be impossible for the illicit substance to be extracted again.
But not all the seized drugs can be destroyed under this method.
“There is a certain condition of the drug that cannot be encapsulated, such as cocaine that is wrapped in candy.
This cannot be 100% pulverized because the packages are very small”, says Mera.
For this process, the Ecuadorian government hired one of the few authorized environmental managers, who has facilities near Quito. The problem is that 80% of the seizures made by the Anti-Drug Police are in the ports of Guayaquil, which is eight hours from the capital.
For each drug capture, a judicial file is opened, which is assigned to different judges who must travel as overseers of the process when it is destroyed.
"The judge was delayed in assigning the date of the destruction because he and his secretary had to travel and be away from his office for two weeks," says Fabiola Gallardo, president of the Guayas Court of Justice, but now the judges can return on same day or delegate to one who is closer to the environmental manager.
This was achieved with the approval of a protocol for urgent acts between the Ministry of the Interior and the Council of the Judiciary, the body that administers justice.
“We have been able to collect up to eight tons of drugs that comply with up to a thousand cases and have been destroyed in a single day, in a single trip,” says Mera.
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