To talk about the current drama in Ecuador, I would first like to start by expressing the shame I feel every time I read or listen these days to opinions about “Correa’s corrupt government”. I knew Ecuador before Rafael Correa and during the years of his mandate. Several times I travelled through this beautiful country from the coast to the jungles of the Amazon, sharing with its indigenous people, its blacks, its peasants and teachers, my dear and dear friends who were witnesses and protagonists of its history.
One can and surely should criticise various negative aspects of Correa’s government, which finally left power in the hands of a traitor, Lenin Moreno, who turned the political rudder. But to deny the enormous achievements made during the progressive leader’s presidency and the great social progress in the interest of the majorities, made possible in those times thanks to the Ecuadorian state, is an aberration, or simply amnesia. In other words, all criticism of Correa is welcome, as long as it is acknowledged that his government was by far the best in contemporary Ecuadorian history. I am also reminded of the Ecuadorian government’s slogan at the time: “Ecuador loves life”.
How times have changed! Seeing the dramatic images that have reached us in recent days and, above all, the reaction of many Ecuadorians, surprised, horrified and even desperate, I remembered the reaction of Israeli society to the Hamas attack of 7 October. A savage and ruthless enemy, appears suddenly, out of nowhere, and the only natural and emotional reaction it provokes is to turn to the forces of the State, requesting its protection, and giving it their full support and trust.
Unfortunately, we are all too aware of the consequences of our emotions, which are controlled by the media of power. We will not speak now of the more than 22,000 Palestinians killed in the rubble. Neither of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the “war on drugs” in Latin America, declared by the empire of the North as “necessary” and “definitive”, so applauded at the time by millions of television viewers who wanted to put an end to organised crime, which was obviously not an invention of the media, but the only thing it did was increase the profitability of drug trafficking and, incidentally, attack social movements disobedient to the logic of power.
The government of Daniel Noboa, an “inexperienced” (which must surely be read as “naïve”) president, as many say, often uses the term “terrorists” and also claims to “defend” the state from crime, which, according to this same discourse, is being “attacked by narco-cartels”. Here we will need a brief historical overview of just the last few years to understand the dizzying involution of the Ecuadorian state and its relationship with the drug cartels. What happened to Ecuador, which in 2016 was still considered the second safest country in Latin America and today is undoubtedly the most dangerous (and fifth in the world)?
Seven years ago, a rapid dismantling of the Ecuadorian state began. In 2018, the change of the economic model towards the restoration of neoliberalism and its concrete expressions, carried out by Lenin Moreno, entailed a drastic reduction in social spending, public austerity, and a huge setback in educational and cultural aspects.
It was impossible that this would not lead to an increase in poverty and crime. As neoliberalism also demands financial freedoms for its most valuable treasure, capital, financial deregulation opened the doors wide to the mafia’s money, which was also attracted by a dollarised economy, i.e. more convenient for money laundering. Add to this the growing weakness of the Ecuadorian state and the progressive corruption of its rickety institutions, and Ecuador became a new regional centre for the logistics of drug trafficking and the whole range of other illicit activities in the Latin American economy. The next government, that of banker Guillermo Lasso, only deepened this abyss, while that of Daniel Noboa, by all accounts, represents the same privatising, anti-social and anti-state line that he swears so much these days to defend.
Regarding the “invasion of drug trafficking”, the last Ecuadorian governments, which subjected the country completely to US domination, cannot ignore the role of the DEA, the CIA or other US agencies in the global and regional administration of drug trafficking. To speak of the narco-cartels as aliens attacking Ecuador from some unknown dimension is simply ridiculous.
There is another objective here, which has already been tried and tested in other latitudes with quite predictable consequences. Ecuador’s indigenous, peasant and student movements, because of their political clarity and level of organisation, remains the main threat to the narcocartels and neoliberal governments in the region. As the recent history of neighbouring Colombia, Mexico and some Central American nations shows, “the war on drugs” or “against terrorism” is always a war against social movements. In such conflicts, states and organised crime usually work together, as they share the same values and their bosses are often the same.
The model is very simple. First, the state is destroyed, then logically crime increases to make the life of ordinary citizens simply unbearable, and after the desperate citizen summons the forces of law and order (the only thing left of the state) to defend him, legitimising with his vote the same powers that recently destroyed the nation.
The main emphasis of Ecuador’s pro-government discourse is now on “saving the state”. It is very difficult to save or rescue something that no longer exists. I believe that since the surrender of Julian Assange to the British justice system and the subsequent withdrawal of his Ecuadorian nationality, the sovereign State of Ecuador simply ceased to exist, placing itself at the orders of the new foreign masters. What remains of the country’s institutionality is a carcass, so undermined by corruption that it continues to compete for the three branches of power; now it simply has nothing left to salvage. The Ecuadorian state should be re-founded by other political forces, not “saved” by those who destroyed it from within and without.
We have mentioned the experience of other countries in these “wars”. The closest example is Colombia. The Colombian war against the “terror” of the violent has been state terrorism unleashed by groups of the national oligarchy and US governments. The conflict resulted in 450,666 deaths and more than 121,768 “disappeared detainees” between 1986 and 2016 alone, where nearly 90% of the victims were civilians, according to the conclusions of the Truth Commission report published on 28 June 2022.
Organised crime during this period in Colombia was not only not defeated, but also penetrated deeply into the whole body of society, from state bodies to the different groups that oppose it. One of the main problems of Gustavo Petro’s government is precisely that, the same state and social construction that is so rotten and so violent that any stimulus or reformist attempt by the Executive responds with the mafia-like moves of the power groups through other state bodies such as the Attorney General’s Office, Comptroller General’s Office, Attorney General’s Office, Congress and the Courts that are supposed to apply justice. Each plays a role for it to make it impossible for drug lords, money laundering, corruption or mafias to be dismantled.
That on the one hand, but there are also non-governmental organisations or so-called “citizen forces” that have been educated by the nefarious practices of NGOs, financed by “progressive forces” from “civilised countries”, with the same logic as political adversaries, and it is again the same thing, devoid of any ethical basis. This is the case of many real social leaders who, through foundations such as those of Soros and the like, are re-educated according to the priorities of the system, distancing themselves from the needs of their communities and becoming new cadres of a corrupt system that resists any fundamental change.
This closes off the possibility of any independent legal political action, as all spaces end up manipulated and controlled by organised crime.
On the other hand, Mexico, a country with a very different history and internal situation to Colombia, without having had an internal armed conflict for more than 50 years, declared a “war on drugs” under pressure from the United States. For every death due to drug consumption, there are 12 deaths due to the “war on drugs”, where most of the victims are ordinary people who had bad luck. Thousands of ex-military personnel have been recruited by the cartels, with salaries several times higher than before, while tens of thousands of police have been transferred to the army to increase their combat capacity.
Murders and kidnappings of social leaders and journalists inconvenient to the authorities are attributed to organised crime. The number of victims of the “war on drugs” in Mexico, officially launched by the government in 2006, according to official figures from January 2006 to May 2021, was around 350,000 people. This does not include the approximately 72,000 Mexicans who remain “disappeared”, i.e. kidnapped, murdered and secretly buried. Those whose bodies are found almost every week in a country that has become a giant mass grave. The real criminals killed in clan disputes and clashes with the police account for no more than 15% of the total, the rest are bystanders and alleged collaborators of the authorities.
Is this the scenario that is being prepared for Ecuador?
In these days of so many tragedies, anguish, uncertainty and above all so much manipulation, I want to dream that, despite all the drug traffickers, false dreams and forgetfulness, Ecuador will once again be a country that loves life.
