From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   How a Peaceful Country Became a Gold Rush State for Drug Cartels   
   By Julie Turkewitz, July 12, 2023, NY Times   
   A total of 210 tons of drugs seized in a single year, a record. At least 4,500   
   killings last year, also a record. Children recruited by gangs. Prisons as   
   hubs for crime. Neighborhoods consumed by criminal feuds. And all this chaos   
   financed by powerful    
   outsiders with deep pockets and lots of experience in the global drug business.   
      
   Ecuador, on South America’s western edge, has in just a few years become the   
   drug trade’s gold rush state, with major cartels from as far as Mexico and   
   Albania joining forces with prison and street gangs, unleashing a wave of   
   violence unlike anything    
   in the country’s recent history.   
      
   Fueling this turmoil is the world’s growing demand for cocaine. While many   
   policymakers have been focused on an epidemic of opioids, like fentanyl, that   
   kills tens of thousands of Americans every year, cocaine production has soared   
   to record levels, a    
   phenomenon that is now ravaging Ecuador society, turning a once peaceful   
   nation into a battleground.   
      
   â€œPeople consume abroad,â€� said Maj. Edison Núñez, an intel official with   
   the Ecuadorean national police, “but they don’t understand the   
   consequences that take place here.â€�   
      
   It’s not that Ecuador is new to the drug business. Squeezed between the   
   world’s biggest cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru, it has long served as   
   an exit point for illicit products bound for North America and Europe.   
      
   But a boom in Colombia in the cultivation of the coca leaf, a base ingredient   
   in cocaine, has created a surge in the drug’s production — while years of   
   lax policing of Ecuador’s narcotrafficking industry have made the country an   
   increasingly    
   attractive base for drug manufacturing and distribution.   
      
   The violence linked to drugs began to spike around 2018, as local crime groups   
   jockeyed for better positions in the trade. At first, violence was mostly   
   confined to prisons, where the population had surged following a toughening of   
   drug penalties and    
   increased use of pretrial detention.   
      
   Eventually, the government lost control of its penal system, with prisoners   
   coercing other prisoners into paying for beds, services and security, and even   
   holding the keys to their own prison blocks. Soon, penitentiaries became   
   operating bases for the    
   drug trade, according to experts on Ecuador.   
      
   International organized crime saw a lucrative opportunity to expand   
   operations. Today, Mexico’s most powerful cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva   
   Generación, are on-the-ground financiers, along with a group from the Balkans   
   that the police call the    
   Albanian mafia. Local prison and street crime groups with names like Los   
   Choneros and Los Tiguerones work with the international groups, coordinating   
   storage, transport and other activities, according to the police.   
      
   Cocaine, or a precursor called coca base, enters Ecuador from Colombia and   
   Peru, and then typically leaves by water from one of the country’s bustling   
   ports.   
      
   Of the roughly 300,000 shipping containers that depart each month from one of   
   Ecuador’s most populous cities, Guayaquil — one of South America’s   
   busiest ports — the authorities are able to search just 20 percent of them,   
   Major Núñez said.   
      
   These days, drugs are transported from Ecuador’s ports hidden in   
   reconstructed floors, in boxes of bananas, in pallets of wood and cacao,   
   before eventually landing at parties in U.S. college towns and clubs in   
   European cities.   
      
   In Guayaquil, a humid city framed by green hills, with a metro population of   
   3.5 million, rivalries among criminal groups have spilled into the street,   
   producing a horrific and public style of violence clearly meant to induce fear   
   and exert control.   
      
   TV news stations are regularly filled with stories of beheadings, car bombs,   
   police assassinations, young men hanging from bridges and children gunned down   
   outside their homes or schools.   
      
   â€œIt's so painful,â€� said one community leader, who asked not to be named   
   for safety reasons. The leader’s neighborhood has been transformed in recent   
   years, with children as young as 13 forcibly recruited to criminal groups.   
   â€œThey are threatened,†  
   � the leader said. “‘You don’t want to join? We will kill your   
   family.’â€�   
      
   In response, Ecuador’s president, Guillermo Lasso, a conservative, has   
   declared several states of emergency, sending the military into the streets to   
   guard schools and businesses.   
      
   More recently, Los Choneros and others have found another source of income:   
   extortion. Shopkeepers, community leaders, even water providers, trash   
   collectors and schools are forced to pay a tax to criminal groups in exchange   
   for their safety.   
      
   Inside prisons, extortion has been common for years.   
      
   On a recent morning in Guayaquil, Katarine, 30, a mother of three, sat on a   
   curb outside the country’s largest prison. Her husband, a banana farmer, had   
   been taken into custody five days before, she said, following a street fight.   
      
   He called her from prison, she said, asking that she wire money to a bank   
   account belonging to a gang. If she didn’t pay, he explained, he would be   
   beaten, possibly electrocuted.   
      
   Katarine, who for safety reasons asked that only her first name be used,   
   eventually sent $263, roughly a month’s wage, which she acquired by pawning   
   her belongings.   
      
   â€œI was more than desperate,â€� she said, asking why the authorities were not   
   doing more to control this practice. Every person thrown into prison, she   
   said, was another taxpayer for the criminal groups.   
      
   The violence has traumatized many Ecuadoreans in part because the shift in the   
   country’s fortunes has been so dramatic.   
      
   Between 2005-2015, Ecuador witnessed an extraordinary transformation, as   
   millions of people rose out of poverty, riding the wave of an oil boom whose   
   profits the president at the time, Rafael Correa, a leftist, poured into   
   education, health care and    
   other social programs.   
      
   Suddenly, housekeepers and bricklayers believed their children might finish   
   high school, become professionals and live entirely different lives than those   
   of their parents. Today, those Ecuadoreans are watching their neighborhoods   
   deteriorate amid crime,    
   drugs and violence.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)