The world is hungry for cocaine and happy to buy it. But think of the ravaged countries that pay the price | Roberto Saviano
What happened in Ecuador a few weeks ago, when the country descended into gang violence and TV journalists were seen by millions cowering in front of people pointing high-powered weapons at their heads, was described in many ways. With the benefit of hindsight, though, it can be defined as a “drug coup”. It had never happened in this form, on this scale, anywhere else. It was not comparable to the uprisings that came before. It did not resemble Gen Augosto Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, and it had nothing to do with the rule of the Argentine colonels or the coup in Venezuela in 1992, because it did not aim to take power, or to occupy the government with ministers, or to replace formal control. The only goals of the drug-trafficking cartels are to force political and economic power to negotiate, to obtain impunity, to have room for manoeuvre to defend their own affairs and, ultimately, to remind politicians of any orientation that their legitimation is possible only by consent of the cartels.
Something similar – but with different methods and timing – did take place in Jamaica in 2010, when the then US president, Barack Obama, called for the extradition of Christopher “Dudus” Coke, a powerful Jamaican drug boss, and his gangs rose up to prevent it. There were at least 75 deaths, but it was a momentary insurgency of the ghettoes ruled by Dudus. In 2021, there was also the assassination of the Haitian president Jovenel Moïse, who was working towards handing over traffickers to the US in exchange for economic aid, and was killed by plotters who hoped to supplant him. All of these incidents have one element in common: when governments disadvantage the interests of criminal groups or favour the extradition of bosses, the cartels intervene with the same methods that they would use if they were facing criminal rivals – as equals.
The drug coup has one strategy – to generate chaos, violence, fear and terror – and the approach is simple: shoot anyone, litter the streets with bombs, make the prisons riot, make ordinary life impossible. There is no military direction, the tools are basic. Every trafficker can draw inspiration from what they see other members doing on social networks; it is therefore impossible to break the chain of command.
According to Ecuadorian officials, the order for the insurrection came from Fito, the nickname of José Adolfo Macías Villamar, the leader of the most influential criminal cartel in Ecuador, Los Choneros. Fito escaped from prison in Guayaquil but no one noticed until 7 January, just before he was due to be transferred to a high-security prison. When the Ecuadorian president, Daniel Noboa, learned of the escape, he declared a state of emergency for 60 days. That decision led to the insurrection.
It is easy to understand why: a state of emergency means a halt to the activities of the cartel, with millions of dollars lost every day, and this may well have prompted someone to betray Fito – by killing him or handing him over to the police – to be able to resume business. These are the rules of mafia capitalism: loyalty only to the power that allows you to do business. Fito would have ordered the insurrection to save himself.
The inflection point for Ecuador occurred in 2018, when the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, decided to relocate the bulk of its coca leaf storage to Ecuador. They hoped to find a new hub for the shipment of coca to North America, and especially to Europe and Asia, but there was another reason. A large proportion of the coca departed from Venezuela, a failed state with a criminal cartel completely allied to the military, the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), which through managing the transportation of coca drives up the price. To end that control, from 2008 the Sinaloa cartel started talking with a small criminal group in Ecuador: Los Choneros.
That first conversation involved 10 people. Today, between soldiers and supporters, 10,000 are involved, with a related network of “workers” totalling about 1 million of Ecuador’s 18 million inhabitants. The initial agreement was simple: store pre-refined coca for $1m a week. Los Choneros fulfilled that task, so Sinaloa gave it an additional duty: to refine the coca that passes from Colombia to Ecuador.
Then the big task: after storage and refining came shipment, as Los Choneros managed to gain control of the ports. Two incidents in recent years tell us much about the centrality of Ecuador in the drug trade: a shipment seized in 2022 heading for Georgia, and another shipment seized in May 2023 by authorities in Armenia. Ecuadorian (or Mexican) drug trafficking has started to fill eastern Europe with coca, capitalising on the scarcity of port controls after Covid and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
So how did the government of Ecuador react to the drug coup? Exactly as the cartel expected: with an escalation of violence. The government gave complete immunity to all the police forces and deployed tens of thousands of members of the armed forces as part of a state of emergency to combat an “internal armed conflict”. But this will not resolve things: Los Choneros has priced in the carnage in its ranks, but it knows that the government will have to negotiate sooner or later.
The violence is ingrained. In August, Fernando Villavicencio, the most significant rival of the current president, was killed, with the Ecuadorian cartels thought to be responsible. The same fate befell Pedro Briones, a member of the Ecuadorian radical left, and Agustín Intriago, the mayor of Manta, the birthplace of Los Choneros.
Of these, Villavicencio is interesting because he wanted to strengthen relations with Britain. More than 18 tonnes of cocaine were seized in England and Wales in the year ending March 2022, much of which – according to the National Crime Agency – was handled by the Albanian cartels who source their supplies in Ecuador. In fact, the base of one of the most organised groups of the Albanian mafia, Kompania Bello, was moved to Ecuador. An exodus of drug traffickers from every part of the world to the coast of Ecuador is due to the increase in cocaine production. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports that from 2020 to 2021, coca cultivation increased by 35%. This figure has not stopped growing.
Ecuador seized world headlines on the day the TV studios were invaded but the world has moved on – not least because in the comfort of Europe, we have afforded ourselves the luxury of turning a blind eye to these killings, and even more so to the growing demand for cocaine coming from every corner of the world. That demand comes from our place of comfort. We have been unable, perhaps unwilling, to truly analyse what is occurring. As a result, we have allowed the criminal cartels to eat western democracies from the inside.
What is happening in Ecuador is a story that concerns everyone, because drug use is not an exception now but the norm. Last year, an international study found that British people have become the second-biggest cocaine users in the world. And it is not just a moral issue, because drug trafficking and mafias mean doped markets, businesses with unfair competition, corruption and manipulation of public consensus, and, ultimately, the destruction of democratic rules of government.
The absence of serious reflection on drug addiction and consumption, of meaningful discussion on drug legalisation, leads exactly to what is happening in Mexico and Ecuador. Pay attention to the violent scenes on the streets of Ecuador and you will understand what mafias are capable of.
We have two paths ahead of us: we either deal seriously with drug trafficking, or drug trafficking will continue, by military means, to occupy democracy – or what remains of it.
Roberto Saviano is an Italian journalist and the author of Gomorrah