Cocaine problems

00:00
Speaker 1
You.

00:01
Speaker 2
Everyone is worried about Ecuador right now. Europe is worried because cocaine from Ecuador is reaching european ports in record amounts.

00:09
Speaker 3
Cocaine that's getting through the port of Antwerp is now flooding the streets of the rest of Europe.

00:16
Speaker 2
The US is worried about Ecuador because violence from that cocaine trade is sending Ecuadorians fleeing our way.

00:22
Speaker 4
Just in fiscal year 2022, I believe 107,000 Ecuadorians arrived at the US Mexico border. That's a huge number relative to the scale of the country.

00:33
Speaker 2
And Ecuador is profoundly worried about Ecuador as drug gangs fight for control of ports, streets, and prisons, and officials there openly speculate that the country's become a narco state.

00:43
Speaker 4
At the time, I wondered if they were speaking in hyperbole, but I think the events of the last few months and last couple weeks have shown that they weren't on.

00:51
Speaker 2
Today, explained the world's most urgent cocaine problem.

01:01
Speaker 5
So many songs wear their influences on their sleeves. It's something we hear all the time on switched on Pop, the podcast about the making and meaning of popular music. Case in. .2 new singles from two of pop's biggest stars, Ariana Grande's yes and unabashedly interpolates Madonna's Vogue and Lil Nas X's J. Christ. Sounds like a Kendrick Lamar humble type beat. So the question is, are these songs just a cheap copy, or are they actually saying something new with the reference material? Find out on switched on Pop with me, co host Charlie Harding. Listen to switched on Pop wherever you get podcasts.

01:33
Speaker 2
Hey there. Before we get into today's show, I want to ask you about something. So this month, primaries for the 2024 election begin, and we all deserve to have clear, concise information on what this election could mean for our lives, our family's lives. Misinformation is a big deal this time around. It's not just Pope Francis in a puffer jacket. There's a lot out there that's really challenging to wade through. Financial contributions from our listeners empower us to do all of this and help us keep today explained free for everyone. You can go to vox.com give to contribute, and I just want to thank you for your support. This is today, explained Anna Lankis is the economist woman in Brazil. Anna's been writing about Ecuador, a country that is very on edge after the events of last week.

02:25
Speaker 1
Last week, Ecuador was totally engulfed in chaos caused by drug trafficking gangs. On January 7, prison guards discovered that the leader of a very powerful gang was not in his cell.

02:37
Speaker 3
This is Jose Adolfo Marcias, better known as Fito, the leader of the powerful Los Chineros gang in Ecuador. He was serving a long sentence for murder, drug trafficking and organized crime in this maximum security prison in the poorest city of Guayaquil. But on Sunday, when soldiers raided the center as part of a government crackdown, authorities said he was nowhere to be found.

03:01
Speaker 1
And when news of his escape spread and a nationwide manhunt was called, gang members in prisons across the country basically began rioting and taking prison guards hostage. So the next day, Ecuador's new president, Daniel Noboa, declared a state of emergency for 60 days to retake control of the prisons.

03:19
Speaker 6
Now, this signing of the decree has basically allowed authorities to carry out search and rescue operations in this manhunt to try and find Ecuador's most dangerous and most wanted criminal.

03:30
Speaker 1
And that's when gangsters started fighting back on the streets. So they did things like detonate bombs, they burned cars, they kidnapped policemen. And some really shocking images were that a group of gangsters seized control of a television station in the middle of a live broadcast, and another armed group raided a university. And that's when the president declared an internal armed conflict. And he's ordered the army to neutralize 22 organized crime groups, including Fido's gang.

03:57
Speaker 6
3000 police officers and soldiers are currently scouring Ecuador trying to find this cartel leader. This is a serious security crisis. And the escape of veto is somewhat of an embarrassment for this president, who only took office in November, vowing to tackle gang related crime. And this surge of violence.

04:20
Speaker 2
This attack on television, was spectacular. It was the kind of thing that you don't often see live on television. Can you just give us a sense of what a viewer would have been seeing if they had the tv on at that moment?

04:35
Speaker 1
Yeah, it was really terrifying. So the gunmen showed up and they showed off grenades, dynamite sticks and machine guns on television, and they pistol whipped staff to the floor. And then they forced anchor to say on television that the police shouldn't do anything. A moment of utter horror broadcast live on television. Armed men with balaclavas over their face broke into the set of this public television channel in Ecuador while it was live on air, brandishing guns and what appears to be explosives. So all 13 armed gunmen were arrested. And I think the point of this attack was basically for the gangs to show off just how powerful they have become and to show off their weapons. So when you watch the clips, that's what they're literally doing. This was on air for 15 minutes. They're basically displaying grenades and machine guns on camera.

05:29
Speaker 4
Even the clip we showed there doesn't show the full extent of the terrifying moments when one of the gunmen pointed what looked like a shotgun at the anchor's neck and told him to read whatever it was that he wanted him to say.

05:42
Speaker 1
So, obviously, there's shock and horror. There's also been international public support. So the US government has promised to send military, State Department and law enforcement officials to Ecuador in the coming weeks. And there's also been regional repercussions. So Peru, which shares a border with Ecuador, also called a state of emergency on its northern border.

06:05
Speaker 2
The president, Daniel Naboa, you said, declares an internal armed conflict. What does that mean? What does that force his government to do or require his government to do?

06:16
Speaker 1
It basically means that the army is going to go onto the streets and into prisons and that they have a much stronger kind of legal protection to go after these organized crime groups. But he has said that they have to follow kind of the rules of international humanitarian law.

06:31
Speaker 2
Noboa, in his declaration, also said that he wants to, in his words, neutralize more than 20 of the criminal gangs in the country. He only took office in November, so this is his first really severe security crisis. And what's been the result of that declaration?

06:48
Speaker 1
So, in the past week, over 1000 people have been arrested. And all the hostages that were seized during the prison riots, there were over 150 of them have been freed. But there are fears that this could lead to a spiral of escalating violence. And strongman approaches in the rest of Latin America have not usually worked. They have worked in some cases, but they haven't usually worked. So that is a legitimate fear.

07:14
Speaker 2
All right, let's pull back a little bit from the violence that happened. So Ecuador is located between Colombia and Peru. This is a part of the world that has dealt with drug wars, that has dealt with the drug trade. Is this time different for Ecuador, though?

07:31
Speaker 1
So I'll start with a really striking statistic. In 2019, Ecuador was one of the safest countries in Latin America. It had a homicide rate that was basically the same as the US. But last year, Ecuador's homicide rate had grown to 45 per 100,000. It grew more than sixfold from 2019. And that means that Ecuador is now Latin America's deadliest country, mainland Latin America, because some caribbean countries have higher homicide rates. And the violence that's been adopted is really gory. It includes public hangings and decapitations and immolation of rival gang members in prisons. And prisons have really been the focus of this violence. So since 2020, over 450 inmates have been murdered in prison massacres and basically, this is mainly happening because of cocaine.

08:20
Speaker 1
So three things have happened in the past decade or decade and a half that have turned Ecuador into a major hub for international drug trafficking. The first is that Ecuador has become a much more important hub for peruvian and colombian cocaine to move to Europe and the US. The second reason Ecuador has descended into violence is because both the supply of and the demand for cocaine are rising, particularly in Europe. So much of the cocaine in the US is shipped from Colombia. But according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, gangs have established new routes from places like Ecuador and South America's southern cone to Europe. And then I think the third reason that Ecuador has become kind of this crime hub in South America is because bad politics has made it easier for gangs to flourish.

09:10
Speaker 1
Basically, there was a populist left wing president called Rafael Correa, who was in power between 2007 and 2017. And in the name of anti imperialism, he reduced cooperation with the DEA, and he had a really bad relationship with the police. And since he left power, ecuadorian politics has been consumed by the fight between his followers and his opponents. And that means instead of focusing on the spiraling security crisis, politicians have been very focused on elections and on getting power in Congress. Meanwhile, the gangs have basically just been buying off corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

09:52
Speaker 2
Okay, so we've seen, anna, how drug gangs have terrorized Mexico. We've seen what gangs have done in El Salvador. We know that it is terrifying to live in a country in this kind of disarray. And often when it gets really desperate, it leads people to flee. Does the ecuadorian government have a fix for these massive problems?

10:17
Speaker 1
There is no quick fix. One of the reasons some analysts think that the prison riots happened is because Noboa came to power only just like a few weeks ago. And he promised to establish two new maximum security prisons, and possibly also like, a floating prison off the coast of Ecuador, where he'd put the worst criminals. And he'd also called for a referendum that would basically expand the role for the military in combating criminal organizations. And it would help the state to seize assets owned by criminals, and it would lead to the extradition. It would legalize the extradition. If the referendum is approved, it would legalize the extradition of some of these kingpins. So all of that has caused, obviously, anger among the gangs.

11:03
Speaker 1
But some of these policies, especially the construction of kind of maximum security jails and sending the army onto the streets, they kind of ape the policy of naipuquele in El Salvador. And what he has done in recent years, since 2022, he's thrown around 2% of the adult population in jail for suspected links to gangs. But it's come at a huge cost because most people aren't getting a free trial. The free press has been muzzled, and Bukele has used his popularity to undermine the independence of Congress in the courts. So part of Noboa's strategy looks a little similar to this. And that's what I mean with there are some legitimate fears that this could really lead to escalation of violence in the short term and then of human rights problems in the long term.

11:55
Speaker 1
But it's not entirely clear what else he can do right now. So he has also called for the reestablishment of antarcotics unit in the police. And I think generally the extradition of criminals and also the seizure of their assets are a good thing. So I think basically right now, it's really hard to know what the right thing to do is. And there's no easy solutions to this, because at the heart of the problem is rising demand for cocaine and also rising supply.

12:31
Speaker 2
That was Anna Lances of leading magazine, the Economist. Coming up, a little bit about cocaine.

12:54
Speaker 7
This is advertiser content from Eli Lilly and company.

12:58
Speaker 1
Dr.

12:58
Speaker 7
Brandy Matthews is a neurologist and Alzheimer's disease expert at Lilly who thinks the first step to tackling Alzheimer's is knowing what it is and what it isn't. Alzheimer's disease. At the early stages, the signs and symptoms may be ignored, I think in part due to the association of the disease with advancing age and a lack of understanding that there's an ongoing disease process, not part of normal aging. So what might be the difference between forgetting an appointment and forgetting the name of your hometown? Amyloid plaque. An amyloid plaque is a clump of misfolded protein that abnormally accumulates inside of the brain and then triggers a cascade of other events. This eventually leads to disrupted communication between the brain cells.

13:52
Speaker 7
Tests are available to check for the abnormally folded sticky proteins in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer's disease using brain PET scans, cerebrospinal fluid tests, and even more recently, with some specialized blood tests. Diagnosis that's timely in a patient's disease course may also have an impact on the progression of the disease. If the intervention happens early, empower yourself with knowledge. If you're noticing memory and thinking issues, go to morethannormalaging.com to learn more about what you can do.

14:32
Speaker 8
Hi, everyone, and welcome to 2024. I'm Kara Swisher, a host of the podcast on with Kara Swisher from Vox Media and New York magazine. On the show this week, I'm joined by a panel of experts to talk about one of the biggest stories of 2024, the presidential election and the possibility of a second Trump term in 2025. The journalists in this week's episode have done some of the best reporting on Trump, from his current legal predicament to his campaign efforts and everything in between. Here's one of our guests, New York Times senior political correspondent Maggie Haberman, on Trump's influence.

15:04
Speaker 2
One of Trump's hallmark maneuvers is creating his own weather and essentially refusing to accept that anything else is fact. And he has proven remarkably durable in doing that with the GOP creating his own weather.

15:20
Speaker 8
Yeah, it looks like a storm's coming in. For that and more, this episode is available now. Wherever you get your podcasts.

15:34
Speaker 2
It's today explained. We're back. Will Freeman is with me. Will is a fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He spent some time in Ecuador talking to key players about their fears that the country is becoming a narco state or a place where the drug trade is knit into everything. Ecuador sits between Peru and Colombia, both big producers of cocaine. Will says, for many years, it was a colombian group, FaRC, that controlled the drug trade in Ecuador, while its government.

16:05
Speaker 4
The government for the most part, stay out of the Farc's way. So there was sort of a de facto agreement, if you will, to hear no evil, see no evil, look the other way, and it kept things relatively stable. Now, all that started to change in 2016, when FaRC demobilized as part of a peace accord with the colombian state. After more than five decades of bloodshed, there may be a chance for peace in Colombia again. The colombian government and the marxist guerrillas known as FaRC are due to sign a revised peace deal Thursday to end the conflict that has killed more than 200,000 people and force millions more Colombians from their homes.

16:45
Speaker 4
You saw a power vacuum emerge in Ecuador, and the situation got much more complicated, with different groups from around Latin America and around the world swooping in to try to control this valuable piece of turf.

16:59
Speaker 1
A gun battle inside the walls of a prison. Not a rare occurrence in Ecuador. Criminal groups from Mexico, Colombia and Brazil have long battled for control inside latin american prisons, which they use to orchestrate drug trafficking and other activities on the outside.

17:17
Speaker 4
By all means, from what we know, it does seem that increasing volumes of cocaine are flowing over the borders, especially of Colombia, into Ecuador last year. Now ex president Guillermo Lasso, who held office from 2021 to 2023, said his government seized the largest volume of cocaine ever in Ecuador's history. Now, on the one hand, the government tried tout that as a success, but what it really shows us is that the volume of drugs has never probably been greater flowing through Ecuador.

17:48
Speaker 2
So the drugs come from Colombia and Peru, and they end up in Europe. Can you walk us through the journey of how they get from the initial point through Ecuador and then to their final destination? What does this look like?

18:01
Speaker 4
Let's take one common route, for instance, from the south of Colombia, from a department like Putumayo or Narino.

18:08
Speaker 1
If you know where to look, it's not hard to find illegal plantations of.

18:12
Speaker 3
Coca leaves, the main ingredient of cocaine.

18:15
Speaker 4
So what you'd see is farmers, basically controlled by colombian organized crime, producing coca, which in recent years has reached levels we've never seen before. I mean, an absolutely unprecedented volume of coca being grown, produced. You're then seeing it trafficked over the border by different colombian groups, in some cases by venezuelan groups. And what you're then seeing is the drug move along transit routes in Ecuador.

18:41
Speaker 2
Small fishing boats like these and homemade submarines also take colombian cocaine north.

18:49
Speaker 4
Once the drug is actually out of these isolated rural areas in southern Colombia and on the road in Ecuador, it's relatively easy to move there. In Ecuador, you're seeing local gangs violently fight each other for supremacy in Ecuador's port cities. Increasingly, what these gangs and cartels are doing is smuggling drugs into container ships, which are then, of course, also carrying legal goods. Then fan out across the entire world to ports like Rotterdam and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, to Australia, to other countries. And just by a twist of fate, making this all the more complicated, bananas are one of Ecuador's largest exports. That's a lot of what's being shipped through some of these ports. And, of course, you need to move those containers quickly. Bananas will rot.

19:34
Speaker 2
Luscious tropical fruits, especially bananas, are exported from Guayaquil's Pacific ports to Europe, Asia, and Russia. So far this year, more than 300 tons of cocaine have been confiscated in cargo.

19:48
Speaker 4
So you're dealing with a situation where containers are constantly being loaded on and off ships. There is very little in the way of infrastructure to screen what's happening, despite persistent government efforts to get something installed. Now, from there, these container ships, let's just pick one destination. Many of them will end up at Rotterdam, one of the busiest ports in northwestern Europe, and be offloading goods every week, every month in which there is some amount of hidden cocaine.

20:16
Speaker 2
Customs officials in the Netherlands have netted the country's largest ever haul of drugs. They seized the shipment of over 8000 cocaine in the port of Rotterdam on.

20:26
Speaker 4
The 13 July just last year. We saw officials from EU member states, Norway and Turkey seize 307 tons of cocaine across the EU and also Europe's ports. That's quadruple the volume of cocaine seized in 2016. So that should give you a sense of the way this problem is really escalating and where many of these drugs move through Ecuador ultimately end up.

20:52
Speaker 2
It also gives us a sense, if that much supply is going in, presumably there's that much demand in Europe for cocaine.

21:00
Speaker 4
Yeah, that's right. I mean, we can just read by the signals we get from these drug seizures, by discoveries made by european officials across the continent. But it does seem that we're seeing ever larger amounts of drugs bought and sold in Europe.

21:14
Speaker 3
On a night out, we met hairdressers, bar staff, a teacher and medical workers who said they used cocaine. I have done cocaine before, and I would say, yeah, it is like a fun experience and stuff, but I do find, like, it is very regular. You do get, like, a lot of people offering it on the streets and stuff.

21:33
Speaker 2
Many Americans associate cocaine with these smuggling networks between the US and South and Latin America. That started in, I guess, the 1980s. We've all seen the movies and the tv shows. How did it end up that Europe is the final destination and not the United States? Or is the United States also getting cocaine that comes through Ecuador?

21:54
Speaker 4
The United States is still absolutely a major consumer, if not the largest consumer in the world of cocaine.

22:01
Speaker 1
Mr. Hannah, you're able to do drugs.

22:05
Speaker 4
During the day and then still function.

22:07
Speaker 1
Still do your job.

22:08
Speaker 3
How the fuck else would you do this job?

22:10
Speaker 4
Cocaine and hookers, my friend. Right. But compared to the 1980s, its market share has decreased. We've seen Europe, Australia, parts of Asia start to consume more and more, while at the same time we've seen Americans turning ever more often to fentanyl, to opioids, to methamphetamines. So I think that we're seeing the shift partly as latin american and european criminal organizations, which were used to being able to ship so much to the US, are looking in a very entrepreneurial way, if you will. They're looking to see where else they can sell their product, and they found a very receptive market in Europe.

22:46
Speaker 2
All right, so you've seen really unfortunate and at times devastating violence on the front end in Ecuador. Is there violence on the receiving end in Europe?

22:57
Speaker 4
More than you might expect. Because often that's not the impression we have of northwestern Europe. Think about a country like the Netherlands who associates the Netherlands with gangland style hits on reporters and judges, or the kidnapping of port officials. Those are actually incidents we've seen over the last couple years there enough to prompt the mayor of Amsterdam a couple weeks ago in the Guardian to publish an op ed saying that she's worried about the Netherlands becoming a narco state in all seriousness. So I think that this is a problem that if the EU doesn't step up and get a handle on, we could see it as the source of more and more violence in that part of the world as well.

23:35
Speaker 2
We have had in the United States, as you know, a long and protracted war on drugs that today is widely viewed as unsuccessful. Right. We've also seen strong men, leaders in south and Latin America, try to take on narcotraffickers. How does Ecuador start to combat this problem without making the mistakes that we've made for the past generation or two?

24:00
Speaker 4
First, I'd say let's reconceptualize this. Let's look at the problem as it is. I'd argue that's not only as a problem of drug trafficking, but as a problem of organized crime. So Ecuador, the rest of Latin America, for that matter, needs to win a war against organized crime, not just drug trafficking. Why do I bring it up? Because these groups in Ecuador are already expanding into new illicit markets. So they started off with drugs, but increasingly they're extorting legal businesses. They're involved in illegal mining, which is hugely profitable, some ecuadorian officials even told me, more profitable than drugs. And they're involved in human smuggling and the facilitation of irregular migration through Ecuador. So what can Ecuador, other countries, do to start to bend the curve here and change the situation on the ground?

24:46
Speaker 4
Well, I think nothing is more important than cutting the links that have formed between criminal actors, between mafias and state officials. Nowhere in the world does organized crime grow without some measure of state protection. Ecuador is no exception to that story. Going back 1520 years now, there have been very pervasive issues of organized crime groups co opting parts of the state, buying off or threatening state officials into working with them, into providing them protection. I think we also really need to see serious efforts to investigate money laundering. Organized crime always depends on interfacing with the legal economy, and often that can make it an even more difficult problem to tackle, as licit, legal, above ground businesses depend on cash infusions and cash inflows from criminal actors.

25:34
Speaker 4
So before that problem really gets to be all consuming, I think Ecuador needs to take down the money launderers as well. These are some of the steps that hopefully the Daniel noble government is considering.

25:53
Speaker 2
Today's episode was produced by Halima Shah. Matthew Collete is our editor, David Herman is our engineer, Laura Bullard. Fact check today's episode alongside Isabelle angel, I'm Noelle King. It's today explained all right, we've reached the end of the show. You're still here. We put jokes in the credits just for people like you. Now, all year. We're going to continue to bring clear and fact checked reporting to this election, to the stakes, and we would welcome your support. By giving a monthly or annual contribution, you're going to gain access to expressions of our gratitude. Members only newsletters Q. As with Vox reporters, Sean will come to your home or office and more to be announced. Our explanatory journalism takes resources, and your support is a critical part of sustaining this resource intensive work.

26:59
Speaker 2
You can support our work at today, explained by going to Vox.com give and contributing today. There's also a link to give in the show notes. Now, if this is not the right time for you, if things are economically tricky, we got you. We'll still be here for you. We'll be doing a show about the economy soon, and we thank you for your support in advance.