Fernando Villavicencio, conservative candidate for the presidency of Ecuador, has died at the hands of a gunman who shot him on Wednesday during a rally in Quito. The polls placed him in the middle zone of the eight applicants. He had a police escort, like other candidates for the elections on the 20th who had been threatened with death by the drug mafias.
Former President Rafael Correa, regretting the assassination, has stated that “Ecuador is a failed state.”
Last year was the most violent in living memory. There were 4,500 murders. It was also the year that the police seized the most cocaine: 210 tons.
The demand for drugs in the markets of Europe and the United States has skyrocketed. The CrimJust program calculates that in 2021, the last year with data, world production reached 2,000 tons, a record that doubles the amount produced in 2014.
Coca crops in Colombia and Peru, which are the main producers, have skyrocketed to meet the demand of Europeans and Americans.
Ecuador is a transit country. The drug enters by land and leaves by sea. Through the port of Guayaquil, 300,000 containers transit each year. The police only manage to review 20%.
Violence plagues this city of 3.5 million inhabitants. Car bombs, murders in broad daylight, also of children next to their schools, lynchings, people hanged from bridges, beheadings…
Extreme violence frightens the population. The state of emergency, the presence of the army in the streets, is not enough. Just as it has happened in Mexico or in the Central American countries that are also a transit point for drugs, the forces of order are very poorly paid. Criminal gangs buy it easily.
Extortion affects the police, just like any other citizen. You have to pay so that the gangs don’t kill you and you have to look the other way when they commit a crime.
The Mexican cartels from Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación, as well as one from the Balkans known as the Albaneses, have allied with street gangs, groups like Los Tuguerones and Los Choneros, to bring terror to any corner of the big cities.
Prisons are saturated with drug traffickers, but the state has lost control over them. The mafias rule, which have turned them into operational bases for their illegal businesses.
The Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, an NGO from Guayaquil, has evidence of 600 murders in prisons since 2019.
Just five years ago, in 2017, the situation was very different. During his ten years in office, President Rafael Correa had taken advantage of the benefits of oil to combat poverty. Distributive policies promoted health and education. Life improved for millions of Ecuadorians.
The 2016 earthquake, the end of the Correa era due to corruption, and the pandemic were too much for a democracy under construction.
Ecuador today suffers social and political chaos as a result of the economic crisis and the rise in inequality. In five years the decline has been enormous. The Government acknowledges that only 34% of the population has a regular job. In 2017 it was 50%.
Argentina, Peru and Panama have also suffered the ravages of the world economy. The pandemic caused a major drop in economic activity in Latin America. The worst in a century. Despite having only 8% of the world population, it had 40% of the deaths from Covid-19.
In Ecuador the situation has gotten out of hand, as has happened in other countries. It depends on macroeconomic currents that it does not control, such as the rise in interest rates in the United States, which makes servicing the debt in dollars much more difficult, or inflation, which has skyrocketed due to the war in Ukraine or the economic downturn in China. .
The drug cartels take advantage of the weakness of the State and the vulnerability of the population.
It is difficult to know what Villavicencio would have done if he had come to power. The last conservative governments have not been able to straighten the course of Ecuador. This journalist, a deputy since 2017, had denounced corruption and violence, and had done so vehemently. He was one of the candidates who spoke loudest and clearest, and it is very possible that he died for it.
Luisa González, the candidate supported by former President Correa, leads the polls.
Whoever wins on the 20th will have a huge task ahead of them. Everything you do to fight crime, to prevent 13-year-olds from falling prey to criminal gangs, will be offset by the demand for cocaine at parties that brighten the lives of millions of Europeans and North Americans.
