If you cut off one head, a thousand come out: the paradox that is bleeding Latin America

In 2018, I was considering the possibility of moving to Ecuador and one of the arguments that came up in all the conversations was its crime rate, among the lowest in Latin America.. Since then, the homicide rate has multiplied by eight. The country has gone from five to 40 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. To get an idea, in Spain it is around 0.6.

Analysts insist that there are hardly any contemporary precedents, that few countries have fallen into a similar spiral of violence in times of peace.. “It's so amazing that it seems like a mystery,” Adam Isacson, director of WOLA, a Washington organization that collects and processes tons of information on human rights on the continent, tells me..

In the reports, some secondary hypotheses are repeated. There is talk, for example, of the political instability created after the tortuous departure of Rafael Correa from power. Or the disappearance of state structures during the covid. Perhaps you have seen some of those videos that ran through WhatsApp with corpses cremated on the sidewalks of Guayaquil by the neighbors themselves because the authorities were not capable of removing them from the streets before they rotted..

But this is, at most, a regional problem enhancers: crime linked to drug trafficking.. Ecuador, like Venezuela, is not a cocaine-producing country, but has always been a transit country to the Pacific for coca grown in the industry's three global giants: Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia.. The drug highways were well-oiled and pacified for decades because they remained controlled by large organized groups, in collusion with the authorities..

But the balance was broken sometime in recent years and it is not clear what has happened.. Experts such as Daniel Mejía, an economist specializing in drugs at the University of Los Andes, attribute it to the demobilization of the FARC.. By weakening and withdrawing from the border areas, Ecuador became a disputed territory. The powerful Mexican cartels of Jalisco and Sinaloa entered into a whirlwind. Later, in troubled rivers, new regional actors appeared (for example, groups of ex-guerrillas in search of a new occupation) and even European ones, including Kosovar Albanian gangs.. Now they are in open war and no one has the ability to maintain order. Meanwhile, the Ecuadorian security forces are not prepared to face them either..

Arturo Torres, an Ecuadorian investigative journalist, believes that the fragmentation of organized crime also had a lot to do with the pandemic. “When the restrictions ended, there was a lot of drugs to sell and the gangs that controlled the traffic could not move it all. New groups were used. Others came from abroad. Thus, we went from two large gangs to 17 in a few months. And some began to be paid with cocaine, amplifying the problem. 90% of homicides occur during fights between these groups.” The destructive force of the drug trafficker and its tentacles in politics are already more of a regional phenomenon than a local one. It spreads like an oil stain that reaches more and more countries. “Political organizations have relations with gangs.

In summary, the fragmentation of the market destabilized the board and shot up crime, in a sequence of killings and impunity similar to that experienced in other countries.. And while the speed at which things have deteriorated in Ecuador is astonishing, it's also not something that hasn't been seen before..

In Mexico, where the government has lost control of several states in the country, something similar happened in its day.. For decades, it was a territory of transit in which there was not much violence linked to drug trafficking.. But the collapse of the corrupt structures of the PRI, the pressure exerted by Washington since 9/11, and the determination of successive governments to declare war on drug trafficking turned the country into a powder keg..

Institutionalized corruption and secret deals with drug traffickers gave way to something even worse: a battle between rival cartels in which the Army sometimes operates as one more player.. And not always the best armed. It happens that declaring war on drug trafficking is an idea that, intuitively, we all tend to support.. However, it can make the lives of millions of people hell and destroy the reputation of the politicians who encouraged it after being convinced by the promises of the United States..

It is pertinent to underline the extent to which the National Action Party (PAN) has sunk. There are few people more unpopular in Mexico than its two presidents: Vicente Fox and, above all, Felipe Calderón.. It also splashed the PRI reformists and weighed down the six-year term of Enrique Peña Nieto, leaving the ground clear for the arrival of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As in the Middle East or Afghanistan, Washington's recipes for fixing complex regions without understanding their idiosyncrasies have caused an unmitigated disaster..

In Colombia, the laboratory of everything that happened later, the story was not very different either.. During the cocaine boom, when the white powder became popular in nightclubs in the United States, neither in Medellín nor in Bogotá was there a security or crime problem due to drug trafficking. Organized groups grew and amassed gigantic fortunes with the corrupt approval of the authorities. The drug entered and was distributed on the other side of the Rio Grande without major problems..

Blood began to be spilled when Washington, aware of the public health problems that cocaine was causing, decided to press. Richard Nixon founded the DEA in 1973 and his agents gradually established themselves in Colombia, coordinating efforts to root out the problem.. The Caribbean country then entered a spiral of political instability and murders that became even more inflicted with the entry of the FARC into the business..

It is the great paradox of the fight against drug trafficking, the same one that is reproduced over and over again throughout the continent.. Tolerating and negotiating with the drug traffickers is the easiest way to keep the peace, but it feeds a monster that then, when it gets out of control, becomes impossible to stop.. If you decide to act forcefully, thunder breaks loose. By cutting off a head, another 100 appear that bite each other, dragging down the entire society. Between the Bukele-style heavy hand (which keeps 2% of the population in prison) and the legalization of drugs, there are countless intermediate recipes. They've all been tried and none seem to work.. “In the long term, we all know what to aspire to, to stabilize the situation and create States of law capable of truly controlling their territory,” says Isacson.. “But in the short term, there is no clean option”.

One last point: the cocaine that leaves Ecuador, via the Pacific route, no longer mostly ends up in the United States and Canada as it did ten years ago. Now it ends in Europe. And Spain is the country that consumes the most per capita in the entire EU. We snort the plague that ravages Latin America here.