Arms trade fuels violence in Ecuador

In less than a decade, Ecuador has gone from the second safest country in Latin America to the most violent country in the region. According to the Ecuadorian Organized Crime Observatory’s (OECO) annual Bulletin of Intentional Homicicides, Ecuador was among the ten countries in the world with the highest crime rates in 2023, with an average of 47.25 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. The drug trade has been one of the decisive factors in this transformation.

According to María Paula Romo Rodríguez, the former Minister of the Interior of Ecuador (2018-2020), now a research fellow at Florida International University, “until a few years ago, the criminal drug trade was the most important in the country, but today it is a mistake to make a diagnosis focused on that,” she shared Dialogue. “Criminal activities have expanded and diversified, and among the most important ones to consider are illegal mining, human trafficking, illegal logging, species trafficking and, in terms of affecting a large percentage of the population, extortion.”

According to Romo, there are many reasons for this security crisis that threatens the entire region. The increase in poverty and unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic, poor public policy decisions, corruption and problems arising from the demobilization of armed groups in Colombia have also played a major role in the rise of crime.

“Nearby, the number of hectares planted with coca has multiplied, and meanwhile Ecuador has subsidized precursors such as gasoline, roads, ports, airports and a dollar-converted financial system” that attracted criminals, Romo said.

The exponential growth of the illegal arms market is one of the most serious consequences of all these illegal activities. According to the 2020 Global Organized Crime Index from the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), arms trafficking is considered the most prevalent criminal market in Ecuador, placing the country in a “highly vulnerable space.”

“What we see in Ecuador is that there are more and more powerful weapons on the market to ensure better protection for criminal groups involved in drug trafficking or mining, for example. In the case of mining, the groups that control it must be armed to be able to intimidate and effectively displace the communities,” says Carla Álvarez, professor at the Ecuadorian Institute for Advanced National Studies and author of the book Paradise lost? Firearms trafficking and violence in Ecuador, jointly published in June by GI-TOC and the OECO.

Weapons of foreign criminal groups

Ecuador is not a producer of industrial weapons. In 2012, as part of measures to curb rising violence, the Ecuadorian government banned artisanal production of firearms nationwide, but many small workshops still opted for clandestine production, especially in the Chimborazo and Bolívar regions.

However, over the past two years, experts and authorities have also recorded an increase in the number of industrial weapons on the illegal market, due to the emergence of foreign criminal groups in the territory, such as Mexican cartels and the Albanian mafia.

“These international groups have easy access to weapons. The new thing is that there is a direct relationship between them and Ecuadorian criminal groups. Each group weaves its own relationship. For example, a local group like Los Lobos has a relationship with a Mexican cartel and this cartel supplies them with weapons directly. There is no middleman or trafficker who comes to Ecuador and distributes weapons to the different groups, but each group monopolizes its own supply of weapons,” Álvarez said.

Ecuador is primarily home to the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation (CJNG) cartels, which, according to the Mexican government, smuggle hundreds of thousands of weapons into Mexico, which are also diverted to Ecuador, where these cartels operate. According to local authorities, these weapons are exchanged for drugs, money and even information with local criminal organizations such as Los Choneros, Los Lobos and Los Tiguerones.

As for Albanian criminals, who mainly work in Ecuador for the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta mafia, Italian prosecutor Nicola Gratteri warned that weapons used in the Ukrainian conflict could soon end up in Latin America.

According to Álvarez, the air and sea routes of the arms trade from Central America to Ecuador intersect with the routes of the drug trade. For example, in November 2023, police in the Galápagos Islands made the largest weapons seizure in Ecuador’s history: 122 assault rifles, 48 ​​pistols and 124 magazines. More recently, in August 2024, Salvadoran authorities seized 1.2 tons of cocaine, ammunition and 34 large-caliber weapons, including AR-15 and AK 47 rifles, on board a Mexican and an Ecuadorian vessel.

By land, the weapons come from Colombia and Peru. In March 2023, a criminal network called Los Abastecedores de Lima y Callao (the suppliers of Lima and Callao), specialized in this type of human trafficking, was discovered at the Peruvian border between Piura and Tumbes. According to news agency France pressPeruvian authorities suspected that this same network supplied one of the weapons that killed Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio in Quito in August 2023.

“The lack of controls on arms trafficking in other countries facilitates larger and more direct arms flows, allowing criminal groups to gain power in Ecuador,” Álvarez said.

International cooperation

International cooperation “is of vital importance, and the current situation is also explained by the years in which this cooperation and work have been lost. Cooperation with the United States can be crucial in various sectors, such as criminal intelligence, information exchange, investigation and investigative techniques, and the professionalization of security forces,” Romo said.

When the Ecuadorian government called for international help in its war against organized crime, the United States was among the countries that responded quickly. For example, in January 2024, during her visit to Ecuador, U.S. Army General Laura J. Richardson, commander of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), announced the Ecuador Security Sector Assistance Roadmap (ESSAR), a five-year plan outlining the United States. The shared security priorities of the states and Ecuador.

“We already have a very solid investment portfolio with Ecuador (…). And it is about cooperation between armed forces, between SOUTHCOM and the Ecuadorian Armed Forces,” General Richardson told the Ecuadorian daily Primicias in an interview in January. “Our portfolio is worth $93.4 million and includes not only the transfer of military equipment, but also humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and professional military education. It also includes cyber assistance training and special forces exchanges.”

For Álvarez, international cooperation on the weapons issue is also important for Ecuador. “Ecuador needs foreign technology, and in that area there could be the right cooperation on tracing,” she said.

Given the central role of firearms in the increase in violence in the country, reducing illegal possession, misuse and trafficking is critical to ultimately thwarting organized crime, she concluded.