QUITO – A teenager dies while trying to plant dynamite in a business premises whose owner was being blackmailed. Armed and masked people rob a bank and injure the security guard. A businessman is kidnapped to the screams of several witnesses and a police officer is murdered in his car while on surveillance.
These were just the latest episodes in a crime wave that, according to official figures, is ending Ecuador in the most violent year in its history. According to police data provided to The Associated Press, 2023 will end with at least 7,592 violent deaths, compared to 4,426 in 2022.
Ecuador is the Latin American country with the “fastest” and “most impressive” growth in murder rates, said Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences professor Fernando Carrión, author of the study “Cartelization in Latin America,” in an interview with the AP.
The rate of violent deaths in the Andean country was five per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017, the researcher said. There are now over 40, making “2023 the most violent year in Ecuador’s history,” he added.
According to police, kidnappings also jumped, from 40 last year to 122 this year, while the number of violent deaths of minors rose from 204 to 342 to 3,188 reported in 2022.
Carrión pointed out that the indices reflect the “diversification of crime,” which he said is due to the proliferation of two types of criminal organizations.
He explained that there are around 1,500 gangs operating in the country that specialize in different types of crimes and that they are subsidiaries of those that form a “global crime network” linked to major global organizations such as the Mexican drug cartels or the Italian mafias Brazilian commandos.
The director of the “Order, Conflict and Violence” research program at Central University, Luis Córdova, told the AP that in the face of these red numbers, the state gave a “wrong” answer because “the phenomenon we have is not understood.” . Face.”
According to their analysis, violence continues to increase due to “a contagion effect and the enormous social roots” of the crime phenomenon.
The first, according to Córdova, implies that although the government insists on countering crime with more police and military in dangerous areas, “the structures migrate to other spaces and colonize areas”.
The second means that “criminal violence is socially reproduced” as a “legitimization mechanism” for those marginalized and excluded by the state and the formal economy, he added.
“There is an army of children and young people who neither study nor work” and for whom the gangs offer “emotional territory, forging loyalties” and giving them a sense of belonging, the researcher explained. Against this background, the state must respond with a policy of social, cultural and sporting integration, he added.
He mentioned the city of Durán, where the number of murders rose from 119 in 2022 to 407 in 2023. This city forms Zone 8, the most dangerous in the country, along with Guayaquil, Samborondón and Daule, where violent deaths have almost doubled: 1,446 in 2022 to 2,560 at the end of this year.
Durán, Daule and Samborondón border Guayaquil, through whose ports criminal organizations linked to the drug trade make large drug shipments. At the end of 2023, 211 tons of drugs were seized, compared to 201 in 2022, according to authorities.
According to Carrión estimates, almost 850 tons per year leave Ecuadorian territory due to an increase in production in the border countries of Peru and Colombia.
The government of President Daniel Noboa, who took power at the end of November with a transitional mandate of one and a half years to complete the term of Guillermo Lasso, promised the “Fénix” plan to combat organized crime and crime has not yet seen concrete results, according to analysts.
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