How Ecuador became one of the most violent countries in Latin America

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Ecuador was an island of peace wedged between Colombia and Peru, the world's largest cocaine producers. But since 2018, drug seizures and homicides have increased alarmingly, blamed widely on transnational organized crime groups.

The assassination Wednesday of centrist candidate Fernando Villavicencio — up to then second in polls ahead of the August 20 presidential election — has shaken the country to its core. Six Colombians have been arrested in connection with the shooting attack outside a campaign rally, and a seventh died in a gunbattle with security agents.

Drug-linked violence in Ecuador last year propelled the homicide rate to 26 per 100,000 inhabitants, nearly double the previous year's level. President Guillermo Lasso, who has been battling the drug gangs but been unable to stem the rising violence, has accused «organized crime» of killing Villavicencio, a former journalist who had denounced corruption and received death threats from the drug gang known as Los Choneros.

Interior Minister Juan Zapata has said there are more than 13 organized crime groups operating in Ecuador, the oldest and most powerful of which is Los Choneros, now allied with the Sinaloa cartel of Mexico. But the country's military intelligence says it has identified as many as 26 active narcotrafficking gangs, which are heavily armed and with numbers that experts said could perhaps rival Ecuador's 60,000-strong police forces.

Analysts told AFP the wars on drugs in Mexico and Colombia have put pressure on the cartels in those countries — as well as Albanian mafias — prompting them to set up operations in Ecuador. For the narcotraffickers, Ecuador's ports on the Pacific provide useful points from which to export cocaine to Europe and the