Although not a major producer, Ecuador is a major transit port for cocaine leaving Colombia and Peru.EFE
In the warehouses of the Ministry of Interior of Ecuador, the confiscated drugs arrive faster than they can be destroyed. In 2021, anti-drug police seized 210 tons of illegal substances, and by September 2022 they had only managed to get rid of less than half. The collection points collapsed with another 200 tons seized from various operations later that year, posing a security risk for custodians, who were targeted by criminal groups trying to loot the goods. The answer to the question of what to do with so much cocaine was found in the encapsulation method, which involves destroying and mixing the drug until it becomes concrete blocks.
The South American country is experiencing a security crisis as it is used as a drug trafficking platform by Mexican cartels and faces the challenge of quickly clearing the hundreds of tons of confiscated substances to prevent their re-entry into the illicit market. The traditional method used by the Ecuadorian government was incineration; However, it failed to destroy a large number.
“It takes about an hour to burn 70 kilos of cocaine hydrochloride due to the chemical nature of the drug,” explains Edmundo Mera, secretary of state for controlled substances at the Interior Ministry. While up to 1.8 tons can be destroyed in the same time with the encapsulation method, this amount would take two weeks in the oven, “that’s 270 times faster,” says Mera. Thus, of the 450 tons of drugs destroyed in the last two years, 369 were produced by encapsulation, which is included in the protocols of the United Nations Drugs Bureau and which Ecuador has adapted to carry out on a large scale.
The encapsulation process consists in pulverizing the medicines, then it goes into an industrial mixer where it is mixed with cement, lime, waste of all kinds, such as expired medicines, with a binder and a hardening additive, the result of the mixture is concrete. which are deposited in security cells,” explains Mera. It’s a 15-meter-deep basin “covered with a geomembrane that’s compacted in two hours,” he adds, and it’s impossible to extract the illegal substance again.
But not all confiscated drugs can be destroyed using this method. “There is a certain state of the drug that cannot be encapsulated, such as cocaine wrapped in candy. It can’t be 100% powdered because the packs are very small,” says Mera.
For this process, the Ecuadorian government has hired one of the few authorized environmental managers who has facilities near Quito. The problem is that 80% of seizures by anti-drug police take place in Guayaquil’s ports, eight hours away from the capital . A court file is created for each drug catch, which is assigned to various judges who must travel to oversee the case when it is destroyed.
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“The judge delayed the date of the destruction because he and his secretary had to travel and be away from his office for two weeks,” says Fabiola Gallardo, president of the Guayas Court, but now the judges can return on the same day or to someone delegate who is closer to the environmental manager. This was achieved through the approval of an emergency action protocol between the Interior Ministry and the Judicial Council, the body responsible for administering justice. “We were able to collect up to eight tons of medicines, equivalent to up to a thousand cases, destroyed in a single day on a single trip,” says Mera.
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