In Ecuador, the politicians who militate for the No to everything in the Consultation (Rafael Correa, Leonidas Iza, Yaku Pérez, Geovanni Atarihuana -Popular Unity-, Gustavo Vallejo -Socialist Party-… do not know what drug trafficking is. Or they know it and In any case, they show no signs of worrying about the characteristics of a million-dollar industry that produces addicts, unlimited corruption, institutional destruction, violence and a trail of deaths.
His vision is openly pro-narco or romanticism impossible to believe in supposed leaders who influence the formulation of public policies. And that this time, on such a sinister issue, they refuse to defend the country. It is enough to review some of the realities generated by drug trafficking, anywhere. It is not, as they say or suppose, a problem of the government of Guillermo Lasso. This is drug trafficking and it will continue until this industry is legalized by the community of nations.
- Drug trafficking is an illegal, globalized and highly profitable activity. So much so that it causes an unstoppable process of money accumulation that, with more or less difficulty, is laundered in the formal economy.
- Drug trafficking is socially presented as a promise. Easy wealth. Of social ascent. Of resources never dreamed of in marginal areas or in indigenous communities. Of political revenge, even, against the empire of the United States… That dream mutates for many in death.
- Ecuador appears today on the map of world drug trafficking as a point of trafficking, commercialization and distribution chain. This is the reality that any government must manage. Ecuador’s routes are strategic for drug traffickers. For this reason, this scourge is a transnational problem and a matter of a strategic nature for the entire country; not for the government of the day.
- It is essential for illegal groups, with pretensions to power and economic capacity, to appropriate state institutions and place them at the service of their interests. Among others: infiltrating institutions, neutralizing control and law enforcement agencies and preventing their operations (transit, distribution and laundering in Ecuador) from being persecuted.
- Drug trafficking corrupts – thanks to its gigantic economic capacity – and threatens or eliminates those officials who do not submit. The State (plus a poor State like the Ecuadorian one) is like a huge Gruyère, full of holes for drug traffickers. Compared to his ability to supply, any salary for a bureaucrat looks paltry. And if the bosses need an official in a key position, they bribe him, threaten him or kill him. Thus he imposes a bloody social order in the areas he controls.
- Drug trafficking is the most serious threat against democracy and republican governance. Not only because of his ability to break down institutions, but also because of his involvement with and use of illegal armed groups and his capacity for violence and terror.
- The capture or instrumentalization of political power is a priority for mafia groups. Financing campaigns is a mechanism to subordinate it. And the politicians who lend themselves (the narcopoliticians) use, in turn, the mafia groups to get out of the ring or eliminate their adversaries. These alliances occur at the national or local level and seek territorial control and control of illegal money and the public treasury.
- Drug trafficking produces armed groups to defend their spaces and businesses, expel or eliminate competitors and, through violence and terror, try to impose conditions on the State. They are groups of protection, coercion, intimidation and death. They can also provoke violent responses from those affected, thus generating a perverse circle of violence.
- Drug lords fear extradition. Because in their countries of origin they have the capacity of force and fire to bribe the Justice or to threaten States with their paramilitary apparatus. In the United States or in Europe they know that they will not get out of jail.
- Extradition does not put an end to drug trafficking. However, it allows States to use it as a deterrence tool. In fact, it moderated the capacity for violence of drug trafficking. In Colombia, President Gustavo Petro is using it as a means of exchange: if the drug traffickers turn themselves in and leave the business, they are not extradited.
Here the drug traffickers have politicians who take care of them. Angels or accomplices?Photo: National Police.
