HomeNewsBriefEcuador's Poppy Find Points to Growing Heroin Production
BRIEF

Ecuador's Poppy Find Points to Growing Heroin Production

ECUADOR / 18 APR 2012 BY TATIANA FARAMARZI EN

Ecuador destroyed some 411,000 poppy plants in a central province, in another indication that heroin production could be on the rise in the Andean country.

The armed forces announced Tuesday that the poppy incineration was the result of joint military and police operations in Chimborazo, central Ecuador.

The illicit plants were systematically placed among legal crops, a planting technique that signaled to authorities that the poppies were not weeds, as members of the community had claimed.

InSight Crime Analysis

The find of poppy crops is rare in Ecuador, which is not a significant heroin producer. The UN has said that poppy cultivation in the county is in its infancy, but recent discoveries indicate that the crop may be blossoming in the Ecuadorean Andes. A poppy field was discovered in the central province of Cotopaxi in November 2011, while on March 23, the authorities destroyed 120,000 opium poppy plants, also in Chimborazo.

According to the US State Department’s 2012 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, Ecuador eradicated 22,149 opium poppy plants in 2011 -- less than 5 percent of the total amount eradicated in the two operations in Chimborazo.

The presence of drug trafficking gangs such as Colombia’s Rastrojos and Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel in Ecuador may be contributing to an increase in domestic coca and poppy production. The country’s anti-drug chief, Nelson Villegas, reports that Ecuador has seized about 12 tons of narcotics since January. This year is shaping up to see far higher drug seizures than the last two years; 26 tons were seized in 2011, and 18 tons in 2010.

share icon icon icon

Was this content helpful?

We want to sustain Latin America’s largest organized crime database, but in order to do so, we need resources.

DONATE

What are your thoughts? Click here to send InSight Crime your comments.

We encourage readers to copy and distribute our work for non-commercial purposes, with attribution to InSight Crime in the byline and links to the original at both the top and bottom of the article. Check the Creative Commons website for more details of how to share our work, and please send us an email if you use an article.

Was this content helpful?

We want to sustain Latin America’s largest organized crime database, but in order to do so, we need resources.

DONATE

Related Content

COCAINE EUROPE / 20 APR 2023

Clan Farruku, an Albanian crime group, was recently dismantled in Ecuador after receiving over ten tons of cocaine from Latin…

ARGENTINA / 5 JUL 2022

Why did drug trafficking enjoy such a boom during the COVID-19 pandemic…

BRAZIL / 26 JUL 2022

Indigenous communities in Brazil are using drones to fight deforestation and the frequent assaults of loggers on their lands.

About InSight Crime

THE ORGANIZATION

InSight Crime Cited in New Colombia Drug Policy Plan

15 SEP 2023

InSight Crime’s work on emerging coca cultivation in Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela was cited in the Colombian government’s…

THE ORGANIZATION

InSight Crime Discusses Honduran Women's Prison Investigation

8 SEP 2023

Investigators Victoria Dittmar and María Fernanda Ramírez discussed InSight Crime’s recent investigation of a massacre in Honduras’ only women’s prison in a Twitter Spaces event on…

THE ORGANIZATION

Human Trafficking Investigation Published in Leading Mexican Newspaper

1 SEP 2023

Leading Mexican media outlet El Universal featured our most recent investigation, “The Geography of Human Trafficking on the US-Mexico Border,” on the front page of its August 30…

THE ORGANIZATION

InSight Crime's Coverage of Ecuador Leads International Debate

25 AUG 2023

This week, Jeremy McDermott, co-director of InSight Crime, was interviewed by La Sexta, a Spanish television channel, about the situation of extreme violence and insecurity in Ecuador…

THE ORGANIZATION

Human Rights Watch Draws on InSight Crime's Haiti Coverage

18 AUG 2023

Non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch relied on InSight Crime's coverage this week, citing six articles and one of our criminal profiles in its latest report on the humanitarian…