This is the script for my video posted on June 10, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
From 2019 to 2025, Ecuador went from one of Latin America’s safest countries to one of its most violent, with roughly 8x more homicides now than there were before. It’s seen one of the sharpest upticks in kidnapping and extortion, and even with US security support the country has not managed to stabilize. So what exactly happened to make Ecuador so dangerous, and what impact has this had on Latin America’s geopolitical dynamics?
In 2006, a democratic socialist politician and economist from Guayaquil named Rafael Correa was elected president of Ecuador. When he took office, he pushed to change Ecuador’s free market capitalist economic model by reducing the country’s reliance on international financial organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. A new constitution was enacted under him, and his administration from 2007 to 2017 saw drastic reductions in poverty and crime alongside substantial increases in government spending funded by Chinese loans and an oil boom. Correa expanded police capacity and social resources, and though he was criticized for repressing freedom of press and criminalizing protests, Ecuador’s homicide rate fell by over 60% over Correa’s tenure.
But in 2016, Colombia reached a peace deal with the FARC, a guerrilla rebel group known for trafficking and violence that had occupied much of the country’s border region near Ecuador. Counterintuitively, FARC’s presence had imposed a kind of order in the border region, and its collapse created a power vacuum that allowed rival groups to seize territory and drug routes. In the years that followed, Colombian drug production skyrocketed, with Ecuador serving as a key export hub.
Ecuador is an ideal location for this in part because in 2000, the country experienced a banking collapse and hyperinflation that led it to adopt the US dollar as legal tender. This stabilized the economy and attracted foreign investment, but it also opened the floodgates to vast money laundering operations because there was no longer currency conversion involved or an easy paper trail. Beyond that, Ecuador sits between Colombia and Peru, the world’s largest cocaine producers. Historically, it avoided their violence and it produces little to no coca itself, but it has become the number one gateway for Latin American cocaine to reach other parts of the world. It has incredibly porous borders, and a European Commission report alleged that 57% of banana containers leaving Guayaquil for Belgium carried cocaine.
The US military actually used to operate out of Ecuador from Eloy Alfaro air base from 1999 to 2009, and their surveillance aircraft supported about 60% of US drug interdictions in the eastern Pacific. But in 2008, Correa refused to renew because the new constitution banned foreign military bases in the country. After that, security cooperation dramatically declined. In 2017, Correa left office and was succeeded by a former democratic socialist turned center-right politician named Lenin Moreno, who cut spending on prisons and security forces. This compounded the broader problem of corruption within state institutions and ultimately led to a wildly ineffectual security apparatus and a prison system collapse that allowed gangs to use their own prisons as a sort of operational headquarters.
The criminal ecosystem in Ecuador is huge and complex, but it’s dominated by a handful of major gangs like Los Lobos, Los Choneros, and Los Tiguerones whose affairs have a remarkable amount of influence on the country overall. In 2020, for example, the leader of Los Choneros was killed in a mall a few months after an early and allegedly corrupt release from prison. His death fractured the gang, and the resulting splinter groups went to war. Many consider this the origin point for the prison massacres and the homicide rate’s explosion. But these are just the domestic actors. Mexican cartels, Colombian groups, and mafia groups from the Balkans are also known to operate in the country.
In 2025, Ecuador hit a record 50.9 murders per 100000 people, totaling 9216 intentional homicides that year. This was the highest ever recorded in Ecuador and the highest in Latin America at the time. Meanwhile, political violence also became a serious concern. In 2023, a presidential candidate was shot three times in the head eleven days before the election and nine others were injured. In 2024, a gang leader was found missing from prison and the president declared a 60-day nationwide state of emergency and curfew, to which gangs responded with riots, hostage-taking, and a prison break. Gunmen stormed a television station live on air, and Ecuador officially declared an internal armed conflict, designating 22 gangs as terror organizations and ordering the military to neutralize them.
Since then, the military has roamed the streets and acted in prisons. They’ve made mass arrests as well. But decapitating gang leadership has only fueled further fragmentation and wars between and within gangs, driving violence higher. In response, current president Daniel Noboa has aligned closely with the US, coordinating new maritime and aerial interception agreements and, as of December 2025, the first acknowledged US military presence since 2009. In November 2025, a national referendum with about 82% turnout saw 60% of voters say they do not want foreign military bases in the country again, causing further complication.
Ecuador may be a small state, but it happens to be exactly the right combination of elements right now to be a real problem on the geopolitical stage with no clear solution. It is fundamentally unstable, with criminal organizations rapidly capturing control of the country’s infrastructure and institutions. The prison system is collapsing into a parallel order governed by gangs, and without some kind of tangible intervention this isn’t likely to get better any time soon.
Keep reading
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- How has Venezuela changed since Maduro was captured?
- Why are the Falkland Islands disproportionately important to geopolitics?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.