Narcos Ecuador

Going into the second round of Ecuador’s elections on 13 April, the polls had the centre-left candidate, Luisa González, neck-and-neck with the far-right president, Daniel Noboa. The night before, Noboa, who has ruled under ‘internal armed conflict’ statutes, with corresponding human rights violations, declared a sixty-day ‘state of emergency’, outlawing free assembly and sanctioning warrantless searches.

According to the National Electoral Council, Noboa won the ballot by more than 11 percentage points – roughly 1.2 million votes, in a country of 18 million (his lead in the first round was under seventeen thousand). González, who narrowly lost to Noboa in snap elections called in 2023 by Noboa’s predecessor, Guillermo Lasso (who thereby avoided impeachment on corruption charges), refused to accept the results this time and demanded a recount.

In Latin America as elsewhere, electoral debates do not usually address core systemic issues – not directly, anyway. In 2025, Ecuador’s debates were electric. González made her case like the lawyer she is: the Noboa family’s banana, banking and shell-company empire is involved with cocaine exporting mafias, she argued, and Noboa is personally addicted to cocaine. She challenged him to take a drug test on the spot. Noboa claimed González would turn Ecuador into Venezuela – a common refrain of the Latin American far right – but admitted that his family’s company is tied to a cocaine-banana export scandal, with shipments seized in 2020, 2023 and 2024. Official investigations into the Noboas’ network of interests have died on the vine.

Cocaine trafficking hasn’t played such a prominent role in a Latin American election since the Colombian president Ernesto Samper took campaign donations from the Cali cartel in 1994. Ecuador’s current homicide rate – the highest in Latin America – recalls Colombia’s in the 1990s. In June 2024 a US federal court found Chiquita Brands responsible for the unlawful deaths of eight civilians killed by the right-wing paramilitary Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia. In 2007 Chiquita had pleaded guilty to making payments to the AUC. Since the 1980s, the banana business in the Caribbean has been inseparable from cocaine smuggling, gun running, death squads, massacres, land theft, forced displacement and money laundering. Given the access to Jalisco and Sinaloa, why would the Pacific banana zone operate differently? Two out of three containers leaving Guayaquil contain bananas, and the port is key to supplying the US and Europe with cocaine. The UK has the world’s second-highest rate of consumption of the drug and is Europe’s largest market.

Some of the journalists who helped bring to light Ecuador’s new reality are now living in exile after receiving credible death threats from the Albanian mafia. But even without their tenacious reporting, it would be hard to miss to the extent to which Noboa, and his predecessors Lenin Moreno and Guillermo Lasso, remade the country into an open funnel for cocaine exports and money laundering.

Colombian, Mexican, Calabrian and Albanian organised crime operated in Ecuador during Rafael Correa’s presidency (2007-17), in large measure because its dollarised economy made money laundering easy and lucrative. Yet the murder rate was comparatively low, and government investment in health, education and infrastructure relatively high. Poverty fell and the country was not militarised. Besides Guayaquil, cocaine export mafias were most active in Esmeraldas – devastated by a massive oil spill in March – and Manta, where, until 2008, the US had a military base to fight the war on drugs. Noboa wants to change the constitution so the US military can return, and has partnered with Eric Prince and Blackwater, who ‘advise’ the army and police on urban warfare strategy and tactics. He hopes for military co-operation from special forces from Brazil and the EU, if Prince can manage it.

The budget for port security police was under $5500 last year. Velocity of circulation is key to profit margins, and nothing slows the movement of refrigerated containers of bananas and cocaine leaving Guayaquil for transit countries such as Croatia, Russia and Turkey, from where the product is moved overland to Western Europe. In Ecuador, cocaine seizures have hit record numbers – three hundred tons in 2024, up from 200 tons in previous years – which says less about the efficacy of police work than the sheer volume of exports.

Colombia produced a record 2600 tons of cocaine in 2023 and at least a third of it passed through Ecuador – probably more. The Calabrian ’Ndrangheta long monopolised shipments to Europe via West Africa but called on Albanian gangs to help move the increased volume through Guayaquil; the Albanians doubled the size of the loads and took over wholesaling in Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg and Spanish port cities. Since 2021 there has been a sharp spike in the numbers of Albanian ‘businessmen’ operating in Ecuador along with the increase of banana shipments to Albania. In Guayaquil, homicide grew by a factor of ten in less than a decade.

Noboa has waged a selective ‘war on drugs’ against some of the gangs – Los Lobos, Los Choneros, Los Latin Kings – while leaving the big fish untouched. He is closely aligned with Trump and is asking him to designate gangs as ‘terrorist organisations’, like El Salvador’s MS-13 or Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, so we can expect further militarisation as well as an expanded US military presence, not to mention increasing cocaine exports, murder and mayhem. The closest analogy might be Mexico during the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-10). Although neither country wants to receive them, it seems likely that there will be further migration of Ecuadorians to the US and Spain, where three-quarters of the diaspora – over a million people – live.