Carlos Mora
Journalist and Secretary General of EditoRed
In Ecuador, violence entered us day by day, at first, like rain through an imperceptible leak, then it flooded the house like a downpour through a neglected roof, and now it is a hurricane that carries everything away. Little by little, narco-violence entered our homes, the daily life of Ecuadorians, those of us who only a couple of decades ago boasted that Ecuador was an island of peace.
We were careless. We believed that violence was far away, only in fiction. It was a matter of the films, the series, the soap operas that every night showed us what it was like to be a narco. And it didn’t seem so bad. You got easy money, you lived in great luxury, you dressed well, you were respected, you were feared. To face your enemies, you hired an army and that was it. You saw the protagonist come up from below, from poverty, from some marginality, and from there he created a new power, one greater than that of the powerful of ancestry, always so indolent. These ethics and aesthetics were, little by little, normalised, becoming an everyday, recognisable, imitable landscape. They became deeply rooted, between commercial and commercial.
We were careless. We thought that the real narco-violence, not the fictional one, occurred in other countries. Some very close, others further away, but in any case outside of here. Borders protected us; yes, borders, those imaginary lines. But right there, especially on Ecuador’s northern border, the rain of drug trafficking came in through an increasingly large leak and flooded everything. A leak created by the inefficiency, if not absence, of the state in the key areas of education, health and employment. Narcotics gradually seeped through this porous border. The authorities repeated in front of the cameras and before the electorate: “We are just a transit country for drugs”, as if being a transit country were not serious enough. The really hard problem, they insisted, was where the drugs were produced. That’s where they kill each other for power. That’s where they kidnap, where they extort. Not here, here you have to stop shipments. And maybe it was true. But the only thing the narco doesn’t know how to do is stop. So he needed to improve that traffic, with control of ports, roads, airstrips… He needed to guarantee impunity, controlling courts and prisons. And he saw that he could achieve this with money, which he had plenty of. Or with threats, he lacked scruples. But he saw that it was also very convenient to do so by co-opting political and judicial power; he had money and threats to spare.
We were careless. Drug trafficking continued to advance. If you already had the best country for the transit of drugs to the big markets, why not also create a local market? And so, children and young people were targeted in schools and colleges to turn them into consumers and micro-traffickers, dependent on the drugs they need to sell to, in turn, have money to consume. And the local gang wars that fight for control of this ant business have reached the neighbourhoods, the very doorsteps of our homes. In many homes, mothers see how their children are tied, perhaps forever, to small bags costing a dollar or little more, with a few grams of drugs that they must sell or consume in order to continue living… sorry, dying.
We were careless. Violence crept into our homes and public life and we began to build a country of fighting. There were those who made confrontation a way of governing. The poor had to confront the rich exploiter, the impoverished south the hegemonic north, the progressive the neoliberal, the militant the lying journalist, the patriot the alienated. In the midst of speeches of progress and well-being, a president would tear up newspapers, insult adversaries, denigrate politicians from other sides… all on national television and, of course, with the applause of the majority. And so, gaining power to impose oneself on the other became the task of politics. More than divide and rule, it was about annihilate and rule. And if the President could do it, anyone could. But not only his supporters, but also his opponents. And so, vice versa reigned. The liberals versus the thieving left, the wealth generators versus the stone throwers, the developed north versus the failed south, the journalist versus the politician who always deceives. After that, any field of confrontation was possible: the committed environmentalist versus the ambitious extractivist, or the responsible oilman versus the dogmatic environmentalist. Fire against fire on any issue. This is what social and political relations in Ecuador have been about for the last 15 years. Always dismissing the reason of the other.
And we played their game. We became a society of good guys and bad guys. I, of course, am the good guy, never the bad guy, I am the one who is always right, who is always right. The other, the other is the bad, the wrong, the backward, the fool, the naïve, the miscreant, the bad faith guy. Don’t believe me? Check any political statement in Ecuador in the last year. You will see that the format of the discourse, whatever the political camp, is: we, the good guys, do the right thing and we will defeat the others, the bad guys, those who act dishonestly. And what is magnified daily in politics is also experienced by citizens, who often do not identify with what they are in favour of, but rather with what they are against. This is not a class struggle, it is a struggle of all kinds.
And we were wrong. We did not understand the state of penetration of the narco business. Thus, when in March 2018, armed groups in Colombia kidnapped a team of journalists from the newspaper El Comercio, our colleagues thought that it was a matter of resisting, of waiting for negotiations to take place to get them back. No, it was not in their interest to kill journalists who had nothing to do with their war. No, they would not kill them; not considering that the whole country was watching the case, that there was a general mobilisation demanding their freedom… But yes, they killed them. They killed Efraín Segarra, Javier Ortega and Paúl Rivas, unforgettable comrades. Their murder showed us that drug traffickers, with their long tentacles, were prepared to do anything to maintain their power. From that we moved on to more threats against the press, to threats against candidates, to assassinations of elected officials and, now, to the assassination of Fernando Villavicencio, a presidential candidate.
And it may be that there are others who are mistaken. Perhaps those who see this Ecuadorian drama from Europe, for example, may share this pain, but at the end of the day say, as we said, “it is something that is far away”. And they do not realise that the winds that bring the storm to Ecuador blow, to a large extent, from Europe. They are winds laden with euros, with dollars, coming from people capable of paying incredible amounts of money for a white powder that they depend on to feel good, to have fun or to satisfy an unhealthy addiction that consumes their lives. All to the delight of the drug traffickers who, with so much money, continue to create countries of people who only see leaving as a solution.
But where to? To the USA, of course, or, of course, to Europe, places where it might be very difficult for them to enter, where they might not be well received and where, therefore, violence will nestle, growing little by little, taking over everything, unstoppably. Is there another way out apart from the exodus? The most peaceful way out is for everyone to stop using drugs, because drug use sustains this criminal business. The most complete solution is for the state to play its role, to be present with its institutions to provide real, positive opportunities for children and young people, especially in border areas. But that seems to be the contest of which solution is the most utopian.
Maybe we should start by no longer neglecting ourselves, by understanding better what is happening around us, in our country, in our continent, in our world. Not to look the other way but to face this very harsh reality in order to change it, not just to endure it.
© This article was originally published in ‘El Progreso’ / All rights reserved
