John Moore/Getty Images
John Moore/Getty Images
Also: Listen to a podcast discussion of Ecuador’s security challenges, with International Crisis Group Fellow Glaeldys Gonzalez Calanche and John Walsh, WOLA’s director for drug policy and the Andes:
It is difficult to find any country, province, or city in the world where the homicide rate multiplied sixfold in just three years. That is what has happened in Ecuador: more than 46 out of every 100,000 inhabitants died violently in 2023, up from 7.7 of every 100,000 in 2020.
In August 2023, hitmen assassinated anti-corruption presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio. On January 9, 2024, criminal groups carried out a coordinated series of armed attacks, including the takeover of a live TV news broadcast in Guayaquil, as a criminal boss fled prison.
That day the country’s new president, Daniel Noboa, declared a state of “internal armed conflict” against 22 criminal organizations and gangs active in the country. Noboa designated these groups as terrorists and belligerent non-state actors, declared curfews, limited civil liberties, and sent the military into the streets.
As he carries out his “Plan Fénix” crackdown, Noboa has drawn comparisons with the “Territorial Control Plan” of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who declared a state of emergency to combat gangs in March 2022. Bukele’s campaign of mass arrests and prison construction has come with thousands of human rights abuse allegations and a serious degradation of democratic checks and balances.
However, it has also evidently decimated the much-feared MS-13 and Barrio 18 gang networks, which like Ecuador’s criminal organizations built strongholds in the country’s prisons. According to government data, Bukele’s crackdown brought El Salvador’s homicide and violent crime rates to levels similar to those of the United States, carrying the president on a wave of popularity that led to his constitutionally dubious landslide re-election on February 4.
“We have already completed conversations with international groups that built the prisons in El Salvador,” President Noboa announced in January. But does the “Bukele model” make sense to apply to Ecuador’s public security crisis?
Here are some numbers that explain why Ecuador should not replicate El Salvador’s model of mass incarceration. If Noboa were to emulate what El Salvador has done over the past two years, the human and financial costs would be enormous, and the results in terms of public safety would be middling at best.
Since its March 2022 emergency declaration, the Bukele government’s security forces have arrested and imprisoned more than 77,000 people on suspicion of ties to gangs; perhaps 7,000 have been released.
Those arrests pushed El Salvador’s incarceration rate to 1,700 imprisoned people per 100,000 inhabitants: 1.7 percent of the population, over 105,000 people or 1 out of every 60 residents of El Salvador. This is the highest incarceration rate in the world.
At that rate, the United States would have an incarcerated population of 5.4 million people. That’s three times the already globally high current number of people in U.S. jails and prisons.
As of December 2023, the combined population of Ecuador’s 36 prisons was 30,804, less than 0.2 percent of its population. If a crackdown were to match El Salvador’s 1.6 percent incarceration rate, Ecuador’s prison population would rise more than ninefold, to 288,000. That would be the equivalent of locking up the entire population of a mid-sized Ecuadorian city like Manta.
Ecuador has a long way to go to reach that level, although its government reported arresting 6,341 people in the first month after the January 9 violence outbreak. If Ecuador maintains that tempo, with few releases, it will match El Salvador’s incarceration rate in 40 months.
Already, Ecuador’s prisons are seeing a tragic phenomenon already familiar in El Salvador: relatives of people caught up in waves of arrests gathering outside prison gates, demanding that their loved ones’ rights be respected.
One reason Bukele’s “Territorial Control Plan” has so far succeeded in controlling territory is that El Salvador has so little of it, and the population is quite urbanized. When ranking all UN member states by land area, El Salvador is firmly in the bottom quarter (149th out of 193). About 74 percent of the population lives in cities and towns.
That eases territorial control: gangs have little space in which to spread out and evade the security forces. Larger countries may not be able to achieve territorial control quite as quickly.
While Ecuador’s land area is well below the Americas’ average, it is still far larger than El Salvador’s, which would make an iron-fisted security approach more challenging.
El Salvador (smaller than New Jersey) could fit inside Ecuador (larger than Colorado) more than 13 times. Ecuador is in the top half of UN member states by land area (76th of 193) and its population is 62 percent urban, 12 percentage points less than that of El Salvador.
El Salvador’s violent gang structures are mostly part of two networks, MS-13 and Barrio 18. They do not have rigid hierarchies and have been organized in semi-autonomous cells or clicas. At least before Bukele’s crackdown, their leaders—many of them inside gang-dominated prisons—exercised some degree of command and control over their members.
Evidence of that was leaders’ ability to order sharp reductions in homicides during past “truces” with the government, even as extortions continued. Among these truces was a sweeping pact during the first years of the Bukele government, which included financial incentives and protection from U.S. extradition for some gang leaders.
Ecuador’s criminal networks are more disorganized and chaotic. President Noboa’s January 9 Decree 111 named and targeted 22 organized crime groups active in the country. Noboa told an interviewer that these groups’ combined membership is about 40,000 people (similar to the strength of the country’s armed forces).
Most of these 22 groups are unknown outside Ecuador, and some are little-known even within Ecuador, beyond the parts of the country where they operate. Some have splintered off from other groups, showing the weakness of their command and control; a key example is the powerful Lobos, one of a few to have sprung from the once-powerful but declining Choneros. As alliances form and dissolve, and as Mexican and other foreign criminal groups forge and break ties, the number and names of Ecuadorian criminal groups are difficult to track.
Weak command and control might seem to make the country’s 40,000 dispersed criminals easier to confront. But as decades of experience in Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere show, it is actually harder to combat amorphous, easily fragmented criminal groups than it is to combat a cohesive insurgency.
Captures of top leaders rarely result in major strategic gains. Dismantled structures are quickly replaced, while the disruptions can trigger increases in violence. Smaller groups usually prefer to corrupt the state than to confront it, weakening the security forces and justice systems from within.
Being able to corrupt the state requires having the financial resources to do so. And Ecuador’s criminal groups have much more robust sources of wealth than El Salvador’s gangs ever did.
For decades, including years when Ecuador was considered peaceful, a river of cocaine has flowed through the country from Colombia and out of its Pacific ports. That is why the U.S. military sought to fly detection aircraft out of a facility in Manta during the late 1990s and 2000s. Only Colombia seizes more cocaine each year than Ecuador does (177 tons in the first 11 months of 2022), and in January Ecuadorian soldiers seized a record 22 tons in a single event in Los Rios province.
Recent instability in Ecuador’s organized crime landscape has made this cocaine flow the main driver of the current violence spike: groups compete for the profits and use them to build up their lethal capacity. “Drug trafficking is largely controlled by Mexican, Colombian, and Albanian mafia groups and cartels who team up with local gangs,” reads the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime’s 2023 Global Organized Crime Index study.
This U.S. Defense Department map from 2016 shows a striking density of maritime craft suspected of carrying drugs from Ecuador’s Pacific coast, during a year when Ecuador’s violent crime rates were among Latin America’s lowest. Photo taken by the author at a U.S. Senate hearing in September 2017.
Global drug prohibition means that as cocaine markets expand in Europe and elsewhere, an already lucrative illicit industry looks to become even more profitable. President Noboa told an interviewer in January that the illicit substances transiting the country each year are worth about $60 billion, the size of the country’s national debt.
Ecuador’s criminal groups keep just a small portion of this, as the most lucrative “downstream” transshipment to other countries is usually controlled by Mexican or other nations’ organized crime networks. Still, even a few billion dollars is a gigantic stream of illicit income for Ecuador’s criminal groups, allowing them to purchase weapons, recruit members, and penetrate government institutions and the licit economy.
By comparison, Nayib Bukele’s adversaries in El Salvador, while hyper-violent, make do with much less. A 2016 study by the New York Times and El Faro found that El Salvador’s maras “do not begin to belong in the same financial league with the billion-dollar Mexican, Japanese, and Russian syndicates with which they are grouped. If they are mafias, they are mafias of the poor.” The study estimated the annual revenue of the largest group, MS-13, at about $31.2 million.
This is a key reason why El Salvador’s maras chose to raise funds by extorting and victimizing their own poor neighborhoods, though it made them widely reviled. While they dominate local drug sales, El Salvador’s gangs rarely had a hand in much more lucrative international drug transshipment, though they made a few inroads in the years immediately before Bukele’s crackdown, InsightCrime reported.
Emulating El Salvador’s mano dura tactics could prove frustrating against Ecuador’s wealthier drug trafficking groups. They will be better armed, better able to recruit, and better able to corrupt the state.
That ability to corrupt is crucial. With a combination of financial resources and targeted threats, Ecuador’s criminals can render many government institutions and security force units ineffective against them. A December 2023 judicial campaign against a few dozen organized crime-aligned officials, “Operation Metastasis,” provided a glimpse of the depth of the problem and probably helped trigger the next month’s wave of violence.
Through Bukele-style use of force alone, it will be very difficult to deprive Ecuadorian criminal groups of their wealth. The river of cocaine running through the country cannot be dammed up. Overland drug interdiction is bedevilingly difficult, even for well-resourced U.S. law enforcement at the Mexico border. And Ecuador shares 1,314 miles of border with the world’s two largest cocaine producers.
El Salvador’s borders with the world’s two largest cocaine producers, meanwhile, total zero miles. And all but a small trickle of the product passes through El Salvador on its way to the United States: the country is geographically adjacent to, but not in the midst of, the U.S.-bound trafficking route. Traffickers have begun planting coca in Guatemala and Honduras, which neighbor El Salvador, but the total crop is perhaps 1,000 hectares per country, while Colombia and Peru combine for over 300,000 hectares.
Its geographic position, and relatively weaker port controls, have turned Ecuador into a hub for transshipment to Europe of large amounts of cocaine hidden in shipping containers. One-quarter of cocaine seized by European customs authorities originated in Ecuador, a larger share than any other country, according to the UNODC 2023 Global Report on Cocaine.
This is simply not a factor in El Salvador, where gangs lack access to this sort of revenue stream, and the role of foreign illicit actors is far smaller. The 2023 Global Organized Crime Index gave Ecuador a score of 8.0 on its measure of “foreign actors’” strength. El Salvador’s “foreign actors” score was just 4.5.
As President Noboa calls for international help carrying out what he has decreed is an “internal armed conflict” against criminal groups, the Biden administration has been swift to respond. A high-level delegation visited Quito the week of January 22, and the State Department’s assistant secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs visited in early February.
Southern Command Commander Gen. Laura Richardson promised a “portfolio” of military and police assistance totaling $93 million. (If that is a single year’s assistance, it would make Ecuador the Americas’ number-two recipient of U.S. military and police aid, after Colombia and ahead of Mexico.) Assistance is following what Gen. Richardson called a five-year “security assistance roadmap.”
Other aid mentioned in U.S. government documents and media reports includes:
The United States has not aided El Salvador’s Territorial Control Plan as generously, in part due to human rights concerns. However, the State, Defense, and Homeland Security departments maintain contact with the country’s security forces on a range of issues, including some longstanding relationships with anti-gang units.
As U.S. support for the Noboa government and its security forces increases, it is not yet clear whether it will be backing a strategy that will make Ecuadorians safer, and free Ecuador’s institutions from criminal organizations’ influence.
Such a strategy should not focus resources on cocaine interdiction and “kingpin” operations, which rarely improve the quality of state presence in ungoverned areas or discourage the corruption on which organized crime thrives.
The strategy’s results will be disappointing, too, if it is carried out like an “internal armed conflict,” as though Ecuador were fighting a cohesive insurgency that seeks to take power and fight the government, rather than make money. Ecuador’s criminal groups are not political insurgents, and the way to confront them is radically different.
Instead, U.S. assistance and diplomacy should support and uphold reformers seeking to cleanse the state of organized crime-tied corruption, and to dismantle criminal organizations through professional investigative and judicial work. Attorney General Diana Salazar, who launched the “Metastasis” operation in December, appears to be one such official.
U.S. assistance must identify other reformers, investigators, and corruption opponents in all relevant branches of government, and also in key civil society spaces like the free press and the NGO community.
As evidenced by the Villavicencio assassination and the murder of the prosecutor investigating the January 9 television station raid, this is exceedingly dangerous work: “upholding” these reformers will mean not only giving them the resources they need, but helping to keep them alive. It also means using diplomacy and pressure to keep these reformers safe from “lawfare” committed by organized crime allies elsewhere in the judicial system, as has happened in Guatemala.
A Bukele-style strategy or an “internal armed conflict” sounds tough and compelling, especially as Noboa finishes his truncated term and heads into another election campaign. But the numbers laid out here show what a daunting and frustrating enterprise that could be.
