Ecuador: A Democracy Besieged by Violence

By FES Seguridad

English translation by Yenni Castro (Valestra Editorial)

On August 9, 2023, the Ecuadorian presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, was assassinated as he left a campaign rally. Although the social commotion that followed the assassination suggests that the crime took the citizens by surprise, the truth is that what happened is the latest event in a process of progressive violence that Ecuador has been suffering on a day-to-day basis since 2020. What are the statistics that enable one to affirm that Ecuadorian democracy is besieged by violence? How can this rise in violence be explained? Has organized crime co-opted the Ecuadorian statehood? What will be the political effects of this assassination?

Democracy in Ecuador is besieged by violence. Just between January 2022 and February 15, 2023, at least 61 politically exposed individuals suffered violent attacks and 22 were killed[1]. The trend of the previous electoral period intensified in the current extraordinary electoral period. According to the Civic Observatory of Political Violence [Observatorio Ciudadano de Violencia Política][2], at least eight lethal attacks have taken place from May 2023 up to date, and at least five people were killed, including the former mayor of Manta -Agustín Intriago- and the former candidate to the Presidency of the Republic, Fernando Villavicencio. This takes place in a context of a rampant disappearance of peace in the day-to-day life. Ecuador went from 13.9 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2021 to 26 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022. This year will probably end with a figure close to 42[3] homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, surpassing Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, and Venezuela.

Among the exogenous reasons behind the rise in violence the following stand out:

1. The decline of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrilla hegemony over the Colombia-Ecuador border dynamics as a consequence of the peace agreement (2016);
2. Regional disputes between Mexican gangs over international drug trafficking logistics;
3. The expansion of coca crops in Peru and Colombia;
4. The significant volume of agricultural exports from Ecuador to the European Union;
5. The growth of drug use during and after the pandemic in Europe;
6. The growth of a group of artisanal sailors available for drug trafficking that stems from the rise in industrial fishing fleets in the international waters of the Pacific Ocean.

To a larger extent, these factors explain why Ecuador has become one of the main drug exporting locations in the region, leading to the generation of markets and different forms of violence[4].

There are also endogenous factors that explain how Ecuador reached this point.

1. The legal adoption of the U.S. dollar as the national currency;
2. The punitive reforms to the Organic Integral Criminal Code that have overpopulated the prison system since 2014;
3. The financial reforms of mid-2018 that made it easier to "launder" assets and;
4. The dogma of the "Obese State" (oversized) that since mid-2018 has dismantled state capacities. This has occurred in several ways:

• By eliminating institutions with direct competencies in security (Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, and the Coordinating Ministry of Security) and merging others (Ministry of Police with the Ministry of Politics).

• By promoting zero deficit and zero public investment policies that undermined the maintenance and replenishment of material and infrastructure resources used in the daily operations of public security - starting with radars and airplanes, passing through boats and patrol boats, and ending with basic elements such as weapons, vests, bullets and gasoline for vehicles.

• By weakening the presence and/or deepening the absence of the State in the form of public services and welfare policies in the territories that today are enclaves of violence.

• By prioritizing, during the pandemic, the payment of the foreign debt over possible resource transfer programs for the most vulnerable sectors. The lack of adequate responses to the pandemic deepened the inequality on which organized crime gangs took advantage to escalate their armed structures[5].

One hypothesis being speculated in some political circles is that the governments of Lenin Moreno (2017-2021) and Guillermo Lasso (2021 - present) implemented an exchange of deregulation and greater degrees of influence in the area of security for the security forces, especially the National Police, in exchange for governability. The progressive social unrest with the neoliberal reforms implemented since mid-2018 made police repression an increasingly necessary resource, especially during the mobilizations of October 2019 and June 2022. Some indicators of this exchange could be:

• The elimination of the polygraph in the admission tests for the National Police[6] and the opacity about its use in the confidence tests of the Public Force[7];
• The handover of the management of the penitentiary system to the national police (times and spaces shared with criminal gangs);
• The handover of migration management and forensic investigation to the police.

This series of transactions led to the fact that some members of the security forces attained a privileged position in the participation of drug trafficking revenues.

The US embassy, some generals on passive duty and several expert analysts have indicated that some state institutions have been instrumentalized by organized crime up to their highest levels[8]. However, Ecuador is not a "failed state". It is more accurate to say that the Ecuadorian state has been co-opted, perforated, and infiltrated by various criminal factions. As a consequence, the Ecuadorian statehood is fragmented and in dispute between the various criminal gangs and the democratic civilian power. For the time being, the state is unable to exercise its monopoly of legitimate violence and its monopoly of taxation in most of the country's major cities. In fact, it has also lost the monopoly of force inside the prisons.

Some instances of the justice system, the penitentiary system, the national police, the armed forces, the executive branch, customs, immigration control, the financial system, and a number of private companies have been involved in public scandals that show that, either by commercial and/or coercive means, they have been instrumentalized to a greater or lesser extent in favor of crime. A study by the Latin American Strategic Center for Geopolitics (CELAG, by its Spanish acronym) estimated that criminal revenues had a share in the Ecuadorian financial system in 2021 that ranged between 3% and 4% of the GDP (between US$3 billion and US$4 billion)[9].

Did Fernando Villavicencio have a chance of winning the elections? In contemporary Ecuador, it is not possible to estimate scenarios for the immediate future. Depending on which polls[10] are considered, Fernando Villavicencio occupied between fourth and third place during most of the campaign. Despite this, it would not have been possible to rule out that he would make it to the second round.

Was Fernando Villavicencio a threat to organized crime? The evidence available to the public indicates that he was. Villavicencio was one of the politically exposed individuals with the highest levels of police protection in recent years. The candidate himself denounced on August 1 that he had received two death threats from one of the country's largest criminal gangs. After demanding that he stop mentioning them in his campaign speeches, Villavicencio's reaction was to strengthen his denunciations against the criminal gangs.

To this must be added that, in his journalistic facet, he cultivated clandestine links with intelligence services that made him one of the main recipients of confidential information and investigations on alleged corruption cases on the governments of Rafael Correa and Lenin Moreno. On February 23 of the current year, Villavicencio claimed to have been aware, for the past few months, of the "Gran Padrino" [Great Godfather] case on corruption in public companies, as well as the "León de Troya" [Trojan Lion] case on the possible links between people from Lasso's presidential entourage with drug trafficking. However, during the impeachment trial of President Lasso Villavicencio, as president of the Audit Commission of the National Assembly, defended the presidential thesis by denying the existence of corruption in public companies. Once his candidacy for the presidency was launched, Villavicencio's position changed 180 degrees to demonstrate to the electorate his autonomy from the government.

The political effects of the assassination of Fernando Villavicencio

1. Construye and Gente Buena, the political movements that sponsored his candidacy, experienced the ordinary legal obstacles to replace Fernando Villavicencio with Christian Zurita (the legislation does not contemplate expeditious exits to a situation suddenly altered by violence). Despite not having participated in the debate, Zurita finished the first round in third place[11].
2. The “anticorreismo” [movement against the political figure of Correa] used the assassination to reinscribe the signifier of "narcoterrorists" on the Revolución Ciudadana [RC] movement. An aggressive political communication strategy pointed out the political group as responsible for the assassination, which caused their voting intention to drop between 10% and 12%, pulverizing the probabilities that, until then, the RC had of winning in the first round. Rafael Correa tried to introduce in the public debate the idea that the assassination of Fernando Villavicencio had the main objective of preventing the victory of the Revolución Ciudadana.
3. A few days after the assassination, questions about the role of the national police, the entity in charge of the candidate's security, gained strength across the political spectrum[12]. These doubts were reinforced on August 24 when President Lasso ordered that the Armed Forces -and not the police- should protect the candidates Luisa Gonzalez and Daniel Noboa[13].
4. The following weekend, the armed forces and the national police transferred the leader of the criminal gang that had threatened Villavicencio to a maximum security prison.
5. On August 29, the digital media La Posta denounced that high authorities of the National Police, the Ministry of Interior, and the Attorney General's Office had decided not to act ex officio after becoming aware of real threats to the lives of Andersson Boscán and Mónica Velásquez, journalists of that media who had to go into exile. According to La Posta, those threats were reportedly extended to a police lieutenant colonel who investigated the "León de Troya" [Trojan Lion]  case and to former presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio. The government and the Attorney General's Office publicly rejected the accusations. The rest of the journalistic team and two police officers involved in the aforementioned investigation are awaiting precautionary measures from the IACHR.

The assassinations of Agustín Intriago and Fernando Villavicencio are a turning point in Ecuador's recent political history. But both the country's political organizations and the rest of civil society seem not to recognize the existing evidence on the levels of instrumentalization of the state by organized crime. If the non-cooperative dynamics in the political system persist, Ecuador will remain far from the possibility of reaching a consensus on a state policy for security that could drive the institutional reform process needed to revert the current trajectory.

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[1] Mena, Paúl. “Elecciones violentas: 61 asesinatos, atentados y ataques contra políticos”, El Universo, February 22, 2023. Available online at: https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/politica/elecciones-violentas-61-asesinatos-atentados-y-ataques-contra-politicos-nota/

[2] The Observatory is led by The Women's Association for Gender Equity and Autonomy (MEGA Mujeres, by its Spanish acronym). Their preliminary report on the first round of elections has not yet been published.

[3] Intentional Homicide Database of the Ministry of Interior. http://cifras.ministeriodelinterior.gob.ec/comisioncifras/

[4] There is no evidence suggesting that Ecuador is already a country of significance in terms of cocaine cultivation and refining.

[5] Please refer to El Comercio consulted on February 18, 2022, “Bandas convierten a chicos desprotegidos en sicarios”, available at https://bityl.co/KopI; and The Telegraph consulted on September 24, 2023, “How Albanian gangs took control of Britain’s cocaine” available at https://bityl.co/KopG

[6] Ministerial Agreement 0173 of July 21, 2017. El Comercio, March 10, 2018, "El polígrafo ya no es clave para ingresar a la Policía", available at https://bityl.co/Kp0D

[7]Primicias, June 2, 2023, “Estados Unidos dona polígrafos a Ecuador para fortalecer a la Policía”, available at https://bityl.co/Kp0K

[8] The statements made by Paco Moncayo and the U.S. Ambassador were reported by the verification portal Ecuador Chequeahttps://bityl.co/Kp2r

[9] CELAG (2023) “Cuánto dinero se lava en el sistema financiero ecuatoriano. Una aproximación desde las cifras macroeconómicas”. Available at https://www.celag.org/cuanto-dinero-se-lava-en-el-sistema-financiero-ecuatoriano-una-aproximacion-desde-las-cifras-macroeconomicas/

[10] In Ecuador, leaking manipulated polls to intervene in the public conversation is not uncommon. Only one public opinion company known for its significant deviations from the final results in the last elections, placed him in the second round. To access studies on polls of the first electoral round, please visit https://ecuador.calculoelectoral.com/2023/inicio.html and https://twitter.com/alfreserramanci/status/1685059843080568832?s=20.

[11] Christian Zurita announced that he will soon be leaving the country for security reasons.

[12] Plan V, "Ocho minutos mortales: esta es la reconstrucción del asesinato de Fernando Villavicencio y la huida de los sicarios," August 18, 2023. Available at https://www.planv.com.ec/investigacion/investigacion/minutos-mortales-reconstruccion-asesinato-fernando-villavicencio

[13] Tweet dated August 24, 2023. https://twitter.com/LassoGuillermo/status/1694884308698214910?s=20