The police captain looked strung-out and exhausted as he reached for the can of energy drink on his desk and took a swig. Leading the unit in charge of finding disappeared people in Ecuador’s main port city, Guayaquil, was taking its toll.
Hundreds of disappearances have been reported this year, said the officer, who asked not to be named for security reasons. Forensic anthropologists are increasingly called upon to exhume human remains. Graphic footage of gangland killings is uploaded on social media – sometimes with a reggaeton soundtrack.
A maze of islands in the delta of the Guayas River – which gives the city and the surrounding province its name – has become a graveyard for the victims of a bloody drug war between gangs and the collateral victims of kidnapping for ransom.
“It’s like a cemetery with human body parts left strewn about,” said the police captain, swiping through gruesome videos on his mobile phone.
In recent years, the South American country has experienced a nightmarish descent into violence, with successive governments proving unable to rein in organized crime factions. Last month, the cartels showed their power with a mass hostage-taking in six prisons, in an apparent response to the prison transfer of a senior gang leader.
Before that, the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was shot dead in broad daylight less than two weeks before the election’s first round.
Ecuador will go to a runoff vote on 15 October between the frontrunner, Luisa González, who has promised to revive the social programmes of former president Rafael Correa, and Daniel Noboa, the son of a prominent banana businessman and five-time presidential candidate.
“At the moment we are totally invaded by narco-terrorism and we have to fight it with all the strength we have,” Noboa, the scion of one of Guayaquil’s wealthiest families, told the Guardian after the first round of voting.
“The violence and death rates we are facing are like those in a warzone – so we should treat it as a war and treat these narco-terrorist groups as our enemy,” he said.
But the country’s armed forces and police appear to be losing the battle against the narcos who have turned the country into a cocaine superhighway as gangs – both inside and outside the weak and overcrowded prison system – vie for drug trafficking routes, with backing from powerful Mexican cartels.
Drug trafficking is not new in Ecuador, thanks to its location – sandwiched between the world’s main cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru – its porous borders and major Pacific Ocean ports. The amount of cocaine seized at the country’s ports has tripled since 2020 to 77.4 tonnes last year.
But in recent years, the scale of the accompanying violence has rocketed. Ecuador saw 4,600 violent deaths in 2022, double the previous year, and the country is set to break the record again with 3,568 violent deaths in the first half of 2023. Of those, nearly half were in Guayas, the province that includes Guayaquil, where nearly 1,700 people have been murdered so far this year.
“Every night we go on patrol. We don’t know if we’ll come back,” said Capt Luis Paredes as he and fellow police officers searched vehicles entering Isla Trinitaria, a dangerous port district. A steady stream of lorries carrying shipping containers trail through its congested streets, heading for the port terminals.
A few hours later, on the other side of town, a squad of soldiers stopped and searched motorbikes and cars in the outlying Monte Sinaí neighbourhood, as watchful parents escorted their uniformed children on to buses and bakers and grocers opened up in the dim dawn light.
“It’s a very violent zone, dominated by organised crime groups,” said squad leader Lt Carlos Hernández, referring to the gangs – Los Choneros, Los Lobos and Los Tiguerones – which are fighting a turf war in the sprawling grey suburb.
As he opened the boot of his blue saloon for inspection, the driver Santos Veloz said he wished there were more army checkpoints – adding drily that these days you were more likely to be stopped by thieves than soldiers.
“The criminals come on motorbikes to rob you. You can’t do anything because they’ll kill you,” he said.
Extortion was rife, he added. Every home must pay protection money of about $5 a week, known as “vacunas” or vaccines – or face the consequences.
“If you don’t pay they’ll come at midnight and plant a bomb or they’ll wait at the corner and shoot you,” the trader said.
Businesses, big and small, are also targeted for extortion – and risk kidnapping if they refuse to pay. This June, an Italian restaurant owner, Benny Colonico, was snatched at gunpoint from its premises by kidnappers dressed as police officers.
“Every day I was thinking in which moment they will kill me”, said Colonico, 49, who bargained for his freedom by offering to pay part of the million-dollar ransom. “When I got out I said: God give me another chance of life.”
But for young men looking for a life outside the gangs, there is no escape. Arturo Carpio was just 24 years old when he was shot at a late night gathering outside his family home in July. He died from his injuries days later in hospital.
CCTV footage shows the killers running from the scene and fleeing in a white vehicle but his bereaved partner, who also asked not to be named, said his murder was not reported to the police “out of fear that they would do to his family members what they did to him”.
“There would be no point trying to make some kind of complaint,” said the 19-year-old college student, alleging that the police force was infiltrated by the same gang that carried out his murder.
She too fears for her life, as the murderers – known to her and the family – are still at large. The couple had been together for three years, and dreamed of a future together outside Ecuador, she said.
Thousands of other Ecuadorians, driven also by poverty and unemployment, are leaving.
A United Nations report released on Friday said the surge in violence in Ecuador was a wake-up call to urgently address poverty. “A lack of job opportunities and poor education have made young people easy recruits for criminal gangs,” said Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
“These gangs are in turn fuelling poverty by extorting small businesses, taking hold in schools and disrupting children’s education, and creating such fear and despair that a growing number of Ecuadorians are simply leaving the country. This vicious cycle can only be broken if the country invests more in its people,” De Schutter added.
More than 822,000 between the ages of 18 and 45 left in the first half of this year and 1.4 million Ecuadorians migrated in 2022. Record numbers have attempted to go through the perilous Darién Gap – nearly 35,000 so far this year – according to Panama’s migration office.
Wary of trusting politicians’ promises of jobs and prosperity and with a drugs war raging on their doorstep, many thousands will likely follow, risking all to seek a future far from home.
