By María Fernanda Noboa González - The Conversation
Who could have said it?
The famous phrase pronounced by the former president of Ecuador Rodrigo Borja Cevallos in 1991, at the Peace for Development Conference, and repeated ten years later by the former president Gustavo Noboa Bejarano in his Report to the Nation of 2002, that Ecuador is an “island of peace” in the world, has completely lost its meaning, and worryingly so, at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century.
Because Ecuador has unexpectedly become one of the most violent countries in the world, classified by the UN as a “under stress” country.
According to a study carried out by the independent organization Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, the country is ranked as the eleventh most violent in the world, along with Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The terrible ranking is complemented by the 96th place in the world out of 146 countries (23 out of 32 regionally) in the 2023 Rule of Law Index (World Justice Project), a document that monitors and evaluates factors such as limits on government power , the absence of corruption, political openness, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory compliance, civil justice and criminal justice.
Less than five years ago, in 2019, Ecuador was still considered one of the safest countries in Latin America, with a rate of 6.7 violent deaths per one hundred thousand inhabitants.
Today, it is on the verge of a rate of 45 deaths.
This in the midst of a chaotic scenario of disordered Government in which consolidated mafia groups, criminal gangs, mafias, transnational cartels, gang members, criminal actors penetrated by the State and common criminals coexist symbiotically and contradictorily, all legitimized in ecosystemic structures, if we refer to the liquid world we live in today.
That is, a world in which what is solid has been surpassed to become a moldable, changing, fluid, volatile, uncertain and dizzying environment.
These actors, through systems of relational connections or underground links, are associated with the criminal markets that exist in Ecuador, including drug trafficking, arms trafficking, vaccine trafficking, illegal mining, human trafficking, cybercrime, white collar corruption and trafficking of natural resources.
The drug trafficking economy drives crime
However, the triggering variable of this phenomenon of violence and insecurity in the country, considered the muscle of criminal activities, is the political economy of drug trafficking.
And not just cocaine, but also heroin and, more recently, the destructive synthetic drug fentanyl.
The narcotization of the criminal economy is due to several factors: the location of the country, since Ecuador is in the middle of the largest cocaine producers in the world;
the dollarized economy, attractive for money laundering;
the limited reaction capacity of the State's control instruments and instructions to map and monitor the various air, sea and land transport routes of drugs that enter and leave the country.
Also to structural causes, such as unemployment and informal employment, societies with unequal and non-inclusive development;
and the strong influence of the media, especially social networks, on the population group of
millennials
and
centennials
, increasingly seduced by the “drug trafficking culture” as a model of leadership, power and easy money.
Penitentiary system crisis
Among the many factors that have triggered the current systemic security crisis is the reduction of the central government's budget for the renovation of the country's prison system several years ago.
Thus, during 2014 the social investment crisis broke out, which increased in 2020 with the pandemic, leading to the dismissal of prison officials and the elimination of directorates in the justice sector.
In fact, in the Government of former President Lenin Moreno, the Ministry of Justice, Human Rights and Worship was eliminated, creating the Secretariat of Human Rights and the SNAI.
All of this led to a lack of clarity in the management of serious prison problems and an increase in overcrowding of people deprived of liberty in the 34 detention centers.
And it has diluted the possibility of thinking about the construction of an adequate penitentiary model, opening the possibility that prisons become centers of articulation of various crimes that, over time, have become strategic rearguards of drug lords. .
International division of criminal labor
These bosses have formed strategic alliances – as operational arms – of transnational drug trafficking cartels, to receive economic benefits from the international division of criminal labor, but also professionalization in the management of criminal markets, specialization in criminal tasks (custody, extortion, money laundering). money, illegal mining, among others) and tactical preparation, such as: training of primary and professional hitmen, explosives specialists, criminal intelligence and counterintelligence specialists and guerrilla communication, carried out with the help of graffiti artists involved throughout the country.
To the extent that prisons have become spaces for the expansion of the criminal economy – most of the violence is expressed in kidnappings, macabre murders, car bombs, media coverage of violent events – today it can be said that prisons They actually contribute to the consolidation of criminal enterprises on the streets.
This can be well exemplified by the increasingly popular expression in the country that “it is safer to live in prisons than on the streets.”
However, the violence generated inside and outside prisons is also reflected within the penitentiary system.
This has been evident in the recent prison riots, which have been increasingly constant since the COVID-19 pandemic: from February 23, 2021 to date, 11 prison massacres have been recorded with 412 deaths in six prisons of five cities of the country.
At this time, thanks to terrorist media actions, live internet broadcasts of massacres have become common, with live displays of dismemberments, decapitated or limbless corpses and vital organs exposed on bridges and public places, and others. horrors.
Logic of violence with religious roots
These techniques are the product of local mafia groups that have learned from the practices of Colombian and Mexican transnational cartels.
The crudest samples of violence come from the signatory groups of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, considered the Mata Zetas, elite armed groups with military training – even in the United States – and their command and survival operations respond to religious cultural logic, which includes cannibalism and the cult of
Santa Muerte
, two elements that influence these chilling practices of violence.
All these elements together have framed the coordinates of other types of violence, such as gender violence.
Especially in crimes such as feminicide and suicide of minors, which have escalated to irreversible indicators through certain dynamics: more violent actions against society in response to state actions of neutralization and containment through the use of legitimate force.
For example, when Executive Decree 707 was issued (April 1, 2023), which made it easier for civilians to carry and use weapons, criminal groups increased their attacks, especially the violent murders of specific targets by specialized hitmen with military weapons. purchased on the illicit market.
It is surprising that to date the existence of four notorious schools of hired hitmen, located in the cities of Durán, Manta, Lago Agrio and Esmeraldas, has not been formally denounced.
Hitman schools
Information from closed sources indicates that minor, intermediate and major assassins are promoted in these schools and, depending on their experience in terms of the number of murders, strict compliance with orders and the level of importance of the targets, their salaries vary between 200 and ten thousand dollars.
The training and training of these murderers – between 6 months and 1 year – is not necessarily carried out in person, but rather virtually, through challenge video games on the networks with the intention of losing fear and remorse.
This is a prior psychological preparation, especially for young people who, due to the structural conditions of poverty, unemployment and lack of study opportunities, are easily recruited to work as assassins for the different mafia groups.
Another example of the escalation of these criminal responses against the State is the fact that in Executive Decree 110, President Noboa declared a state of exception with a curfew throughout the country, after the escape of the top leader of the most criminal group. Importantly, Los Choneros, which resulted in attacks with explosives, kidnappings and arrests of members of the public force and prison officials.
A frank demonstration of the firepower of criminality against the force apparatus of the State.
And it has become, more than an affront, a war between crime and the State for territories and populations.
Another important and very serious element of this context is the increasingly powerful mechanisms for recruiting the inhabitants of the most economically fragile areas, who are forced (whether due to threats or economic necessity) to integrate into the criminal dynamics.
A narco-state under construction
In this sense, decision-making at the subnational and territorial level is directed by criminal groups that influence sectional governments, municipalities and mayors' offices to consolidate spaces of criminal legality (spaces painted as legal, but that hide illegal activities) and advance their objectives. strategic goals of finally consolidating a narco-state.
Finally, between macabre murders, kidnappings and scary narratives, citizens survive a daily scenario of horror.
With high levels of emotional stress due to the variety of violence.
This forces them to change their routines, their spaces for distraction or to forcibly seclude themselves to avoid being victims of an environment of insecurity and distrust towards everything and everyone.
This perception continues to be amplified by the actions of the media and social networks, whose speeches and narratives often reproduce these phenomena without due commitment to journalistic ethics and social responsibility.