Ecuador’s geographic location and other environmental characteristics have long provided incentives for transnational organized crime groups to exploit the country as a drug transshipment point and a logistical safe haven.
Military intelligence has revealed a flow of arms from Chile and Peru into Ecuador along its southern border, highlighting the country's key role in emerging arms trafficking routes.
Ecuador is reeling from its worst-ever prison massacre in Guayaquil but the factors that led to this situation could well be replicated in other countries across the region.
Ecuador’s geographic location and other environmental characteristics have long provided incentives for transnational organized crime groups to exploit the country as a drug transshipment point and a logistical safe haven. Ecuador’s diverse transnational criminal landscape, dominated mainly by Colombian criminal and guerrilla groups as well as Mexican cartels, has led some to describe it as the “United Nations” of organized crime.
Once considered one of the most insecure countries in the region, Ecuador has succeeded in tackling certain manifestations of violence in recent years. But drug trafficking through the country is on the rise, paving the way for possible growing insecurity further down the road.
The recent dismantling of a migrant smuggling ring in Colombia has revealed the routes, corruption networks and modus operandi used to move thousands of migrants through the country.
Authorities have made a string of explosives and weapons seizures while patrolling the Colombia-Ecuador border region – a remote and lawless frontier that is home to a volatile mix of…
Seven people were gunned down in Guayaquil after a record cocaine seizure – in a revenge attack that shows ripples in the equilibrium of drug gangs responsible for the storage…
The US Coast Guard unloaded 27 tons of cocaine after a three-month operation in the Pacific and Caribbean, a massive haul that underscores maritime drug flows and cocaine production remain…
The alleged exporter of a shipment of 26 tons of illegal shark fins from Ecuador to Hong Kong has received a fine of a few thousand dollars, showing how people…
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