COMMENTARY As long as Latin America's left and right wings keep weakening democratic institutions, the gang wing will keep gaining power in countries like Ecuador. And Mexico. And Haiti. And so on.
In a sad and macabre way, there may be no real point in holding Ecuador’s snap presidential election this Sunday. We already know who the winner is.
Criminal gangs.
Call it goon governance, thug theocracy, mafia ministry. Slap whatever pathetic etiqueta you want on the pathetic realidad that gang-wing rule, as I’ve warned before in this space, is replacing right-wing and left-wing government across Latin America and the Caribbean.
READ MORE: Latin America can no longer deny the awful reality of gang-wing government
Ecuador is just the region’s latest domino to fall.
Last week, presidential candidate and former investigative journalist Fernando Villavicencio was brutally assassinated by gunmen after a campaign rally in the capital, Quito.
Villavicencio’s cold-blooded murder was preceded by the killing less than three weeks earlier of Agustín Intriago, mayor of the Pacific port city of Manta; and it was quickly followed by this week’s slaying of Pedro Briones, a leader in the party of presidential front-runner Luisa González, in San Mateo de Esmeraldas.
All three of those brazen political homicides are the result of Ecuador’s de facto takeover by narco-cartels.
In cases like Villavicencio’s, those syndicates are making it clear they won’t tolerate any do-gooder anti-corruption platforms. They’ll brook no agenda that disrupts the oh-so-lucrative marriage between their interests and the greed of public officials who just gotta have that beach condo in Salinas that only six-figure payoffs from cocaine gangbangers like Los Choneros (who’d earlier threatened Villavicencio) can get them.
Now Ecuador joins Latin America’s other gang-governed nations, from Mexico to Honduras to Haiti to Colombia. And we watch and wonder what other republics in the region — a continent that in recent years has been home to 23 of the 25 cities with the world’s highest murder rates — will sooner than later follow.
We need to debunk the myth that countries like Ecuador are innocent, unsuspecting oases that are suddenly, unexpectedly waylaid by this plague.
In the meantime, though, there’s one myth making the media rounds this week that we need to debunk: namely, that countries like Ecuador are just innocent, unsuspecting oases that suddenly, unexpectedly get waylaid by this plague.
That’s nonsense.
True, Ecuador’s murder rate leapt almost 250% between 2020 and 2022. I realize that invites the assumption that this is an overnight blitzkrieg that’s swept the country as quickly as wildfires devoured Maui last week.
But the gates started opening to Los Choneros — and Los Lobos and Los Tiguerones and all the other Ecuadorian mobsters — long before this decade. And they really started swinging wide under the rule of the president who himself targeted the journalist Villavicencio during the 2010s, a populist creep named Rafael Correa.
Caudillos and cartels
Villavicencio ferreted out the official malfeasance that burst at the seams amid the Ecuadorian oil boom of those years, especially the bribes we now know Correa himself took in exchange for petro-contracts. Correa, a petulant leftist authoritarian who ruled from 2007 to 2017, tried to throw Villavicencio behind bars for his investigative work. Villavicencio hid out in the Amazon long enough to avoid prison — and to see Correa eventually convicted in 2020.
But by then Correa’s damage was done. His crooked and caudillo rule degraded Ecuador’s already vulnerable democratic and rule-of-law institutions, setting the stage for the empowerment of the country’s gang wing.
And this keeps happening over and over in Latin America — not overnight, but over years.
Mexicans didn’t just wake up one morning to gang government. It incubated for seven decades under the hyper-corrupt and hyper-authoritarian boot of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI — so that when democracy finally did arrive in Mexico in 2000, its own institutions were too fledgling to take on the country’s monstrous drug cartels. The cartels are still winning.
In El Salvador, autocratic President Nayib Bukele — adored by the world's right wing — wants us to believe his sprawling, rights-abusing crackdown on the country’s omnipotent gangs, or maras, is the answer.
Maybe in the short term. But not in the long run. Latin American history leaves little doubt that la mano dura, or the iron fist, doesn’t extinguish the lawlessness the gangs represent — it ends up stoking it by exalting despotic fiat over democratic fairness. It wipes from a society’s sight the reality that there’s an enlightened alternative to caudillos and cartels.
All I know is, even today much of Latin America — too much — looks incapable of forging that alternative.
And that’s all the gang wing needs to know.
