The newspaper El Comercio reports that Mexican groups now likely have the capacity to transport their own drug shipments and that turf wars could ensue over control of departure points and routes.
At present, the conflict is still in its preliminary, non-violent stages. El Comercio reports that Gangs are trying to damage their rivals by tipping off authorities to the location of cocaine shipments. This summer, police seized 1.9 tons of cocaine in the coastal province of Manabi alone. And El Comercio says that most of those seizures resulted from gang members’ information, at a cost of $20,000-$40,000 per tipoff.
Colombian gangs are well-established wholesalers, reports researcher Edward Fox at InSight Crime, and they are “unlikely to to give up their position without a fight.”
If that’s the case, violence is almost certainly in Ecuador’s future, and the question becomes whether or not the country’s police and security forces are up to the task.
An internal military report in Ecuador earlier this year “vastly underestimated” the organized crime threat, reports InsightCrime. Since then, the government has announced a plan to train 4,000 troops specifically for combating organized crime, but InsightCrime fears that may be insufficient if Colombian and Mexican groups are in open war.
