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.
While authorities in Ecuador tally record cocaine seizures, a change to the criminal code in the Andean country has possibly made it more difficult to prosecute large-scale traffickers.
Drug trafficking and transnational organized crime have been blamed for deadly riots among rival gangs in Ecuador's prisons, but the carnage has more to do with how the country's gangs…
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.
Los Choneros is one of Ecuador’s most prominent criminal groups, which first emerged in the late 1990s as a drug trafficking organization based in the city of Manta, a beach…
Long-simmering tensions between prison gangs in Ecuador exploded this week, leaving at least 75 people brutally killed in four prisons across the country.
In July 2020, British drug trafficker Robert Dawes was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in one of the most emblematic European drug trafficking cases of the…
While unrest gripped much of Latin America in 2019, it was the coronavirus that took center stage and ripped through the region in 2020, upending everything from commercial trade to…
Within the span of a week, cocaine was discovered in two separate maritime cargo containers bound for Libya, a strong indication that both the north African country and broader region…
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