CIVICUS speaks about the current crisis of violence in Ecuador with Mauro Cerbino, professor and researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Ecuador.
Professor Cerbino’s research focuses on youth cultures and organisations and links between young people and violence.
How did Ecuador become one of the most violent countries in Latin America?
To understand the very complex context of violence in Ecuador, it is important to analyse the factors that have enabled this situation. In recent years there has been a great deterioration in the living conditions of young people from low-income groups. Education has lost meaning to them because it does not fulfil the purpose of offering meaningful alternatives and helping to improve their living conditions. The relationship between educators and learners has deteriorated and mutual trust has been lost.
Further, due to the absence of public policies for urban young people, it was not detected that a process of impoverishment was taking place on the ground. This was not just about economic poverty, which was indeed recently exacerbated by the pandemic, but also symbolic poverty, linked to the lack of cultural and recreational spaces for people to have the opportunity to live a meaningful life.
All this came on top of the problem of drug trafficking. As a result of Ecuador’s adoption of the US dollar as the currency in 2000, the criminal economy has grown greatly. Ecuador’s geographical position has also contributed to this: the country has seven ports, which has facilitated the export of drugs, particularly to Europe. The international criminal economy has found the right conditions to insert itself in Ecuador.
The flourishing criminal economy offered adolescents and young people ever-greater opportunities for quick profits, while the state lost its capacity to create conditions for people to live meaningful lives in local communities. The appeal of criminal alternatives was accentuated by the rise of the aesthetics of drug trafficking, which strongly attracted young people because it offered them meaning in the form of recognition, social standing and the exercise of at least a small amount of power in a very hierarchical and fractured society. In a global context marked by the society of spectacle, necropolitics – the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and others must die – and the commodification and obsolescence of life and death, it became impossible for legal society to compete with the seductive power of criminal organisations.
Finally, the action of criminal groups is also a symptom that the social contract is in question. These groups, their families and close circles view the state and legal society as illegitimate. For them, violent crimes, particularly murder, are wrongs to be judged by God but not by the laws of the state or by other people. Guilt for violent acts can be assumed in the face of the divine, but this doesn’t mean accepting responsibility to other people or institutions. This is the state’s greatest failure in projecting itself as governed by the rule of law, a guarantor of coexistence based on legality.
In sum, the security crisis in Ecuador responds to a combination of factors, among which the conditions experienced by children and young people stand out. Any effective response will therefore need to break with the individualistic logic and rebuild the community – through education, art, dialogue and culture – to confer meaning on the lives of so many young people who currently don’t care whether they live, kill or die.
How has the recent change of government affected this situation?
The perception of insecurity was one of the most debated issues in the last election campaign, which brought Daniel Noboa, a young man from a business family in Guayaquil, to the presidency. The debate was strongly securitised, focusing on police and military reaction and the imposition of penalties and punishments.
Noboa was elected in October 2023 to complete the term of his predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, and will only be in office for about a year and a half. With people increasingly concerned about insecurity, the president responded to the violence triggered by prison riots by declaring a state of emergency and imposing a 60-day curfew. These measures were also possibly intended to boost his popularity and improve his government’s rating in view of next year’s elections, in which he has expressed his intention to run.
In declaring a state of emergency, the government handed over the coordination of public order operations to the military. The stance taken by the government, which has referred to the situation as a state of internal war, has been echoed by the mainstream media and apparently endorsed by broad segments of public opinion. In the face of this, the political opposition has remained virtually silent. The largest opposition party, Citizen Revolution, led by former president Rafael Correa, has practically bought into the government’s decisions to avoid isolation as much as out of an inability to propose alternatives.
How have people reacted to the proposed referendum to legitimise stricter security measures?
The majority of public opinion will likely support all the security-related decisions being taken by the government, partly because people have experienced insecurity first hand, but also and primarily because of the insistent media narrative on the issue and its amplification through social media. All private media have broadcast demonstrations in favour of military and police presence on the streets.
The questions for the referendum are currently being studied by the Constitutional Court, which has not yet ruled on their admissibility. Most of the questions refer to insecurity. If the referendum proceeds as planned, the majority will likely support the government. This is because there has been virtually no public discussion of other ways of dealing with insecurity, despite decades of a security-based approach producing little result.
However, there are other ways of understanding security. As early as 1994, the United Nations put forward the notion of human security, while the Organization of American States developed the concept of multidimensional security in 2003. Both put human beings at the centre and take into account the links between security problems and structural social conditions of injustice, inequality and lack of conditions for the exercise of rights.
Do you think Noboa could become the next Bukele?
The so-called ‘Bukele model’ – based on the repressive response to violence of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele – appears to be popular in many countries, particularly those ruled by the right or the far right. In the case of Ecuador, I think some of the measures implemented in El Salvador will be replicated. For example, President Noboa has decided to build two maximum-security mega-prisons.
But the model is not entirely applicable because these are countries with different geopolitical characteristics and different criminological situations. In El Salvador the problem is gangs, while in Ecuador it is organised crime. Further, at least for the moment, Ecuador’s constitution includes strong guarantees of rights, while these have been greatly eroded in El Salvador over several years of Bukele’s rule.
To what extent is this crisis of violence a transnational problem, and what kind of international support has Ecuador received to address it?
The problem of drug trafficking is transnational and global. It involves organisations, such as mafias and cartels, that are distributed around the world. It requires effective inter-state cooperation to combat it.
Some countries, such as the USA, have offered support to Ecuador, but we know that these offers hide international policy interests that are not always explicit. The European Union has also expressed its willingness to provide assistance, but so far it’s not clear what this assistance will consist of. More and more cases of corruption and collusion of parts of the Ecuadorian state with organised crime are coming to light, which obviously hampers international cooperation with the Ecuadorian state.
In any case, international cooperation must commit to addressing the structural problems that contribute to violence. It is essential that it contributes to strengthening social policy.
Civic space in Ecuador is rated ‘obstructed’ by the CIVICUS Monitor.
Get in touch with FLACSO Ecuador through its website or Facebook page, and follow it on Twitter and Instagram.
