Fighting an international alliance of gangs, guerrilla groups, drug cartels and mafias, the Ecuadorean military found itself alone.
By 2022, the government had lost control of major prisons, with gangs running them as recruitment centers. Killings were rising fast, and it was clear that far more cocaine was moving through the country than the authorities could ever hope to seize.
But when the U.S. ambassador at the time, Mike Fitzpatrick, phoned Washington to convey Ecuador’s plea for help, his calls fell on deaf ears, he said.
“‘Where is the fentanyl? That’s our focus right now,’” he recalled being told by senior State Department officials. “Ecuador didn’t have a fentanyl hook to sell to Washington, it’s all cocaine.”
Since President Trump first took office in 2017 and continuing through President Joseph R. Biden’s term, the United States largely shifted its focus to combating fentanyl, the drug driving a national overdose crisis.
Given the soaring fentanyl deaths in the United States, making it a priority made sense, officials say. But the severity of the switch gave room for cocaine traffickers, once a prime target of American law enforcement, to thrive — so much that Ecuador nearly collapsed into the grip of criminal groups, according to five current and former U.S. and Ecuadorean officials. In the decades-long war against drugs, cocaine, it seemed, was no longer a priority.
Even now, after the United States eventually mustered a response and increased financial aid to help Ecuador’s military fight drug groups, its government is struggling to keep control.
Several of Ecuador’s cities now rank among the world’s most dangerous — a situation unthinkable just four years ago when the country was known for its safety, roses and Galápagos tortoises. Car bombs terrorize civilians, and gangs frequently clash with military troops. Officials describe a criminal culture so powerful that schoolchildren aspire to join gangs.
“This is an existential war,” said Giovanni Davoli, the Italian ambassador to Ecuador, who compared the fight to Italy’s struggle against mafias. “Ecuador is not a narco state, but it needs help.”
The Trump administration has launched an aggressive military campaign in the region, attacking boats it says are smuggling drugs, but it is unclear whether those strikes will make a dent in the resurgent cocaine trade.
Nor is it clear whether that is its ultimate goal.
While American officials have called the campaign a counterdrug operation, they have offered little evidence that the boats carried drugs. The operation has also focused on Venezuela, whose role in the drug trade is fairly limited. Privately, American officials have made clear that the Trump administration aims to drive Venezuela’s authoritarian leader from power.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Many Ecuadoreans now feel torn between wanting U.S. help and fearing the Trump administration’s assertion of dominance over the region. When Ecuador held a referendum in November on whether to let foreign military bases in the country — which analysts called a thinly veiled invitation for U.S. forces — voters rejected it.
Yet when several fishermen on the Pacific were stopped by Ecuador’s Navy on a recent day, they were glad to see any military presence at all. Criminals ran the waves, they said, extorting fishermen who dared go farther to sea.
“Things have taken a turn for the worse,” said one man, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from criminals. “Out there, you either pay the gangs, or you don’t come back.”
A ‘Cocaine Superhighway’
For decades, Ecuador was a pillar of stability next to neighbors like Colombia and Peru, which were racked by drug violence and political disarray.
From that place of relative security, Ecuador pushed the United States away, closing a U.S. military base in 2009. In response, the American Embassy shut down its military office and main State Department drug-fighting program in Ecuador.
By the time Mr. Trump first became president, Mexican cartels, lying low in Ecuador, were consolidating their power.
The cartels worked with Colombian groups to push cocaine into Ecuador, where gangs then exported the drug using speedboats, submarines and hijacked cargo containers bound for Europe and the United States. As the trade grew, those partnerships expanded to include European mafias, officials say.
The alliances transformed Ecuador into what American officials called a “cocaine superhighway.” Ecuador’s president has estimated that as much as 70 percent of the world’s supply flows through his nation.
That change took place as fentanyl became a leading cause of death in the United States, fueling an overdose crisis that Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden both made a priority. In 2023, nearly 73,000 overdoses were linked to fentanyl, compared to 6,000 deaths tied to cocaine unlaced with other drugs, according to U.S. government statistics.
“Cocaine came to be seen by many as ‘bad, but not going-to-kill-you bad,’” said Mr. Fitzpatrick, the ambassador to Ecuador from 2019 to 2024. Regarded by some as “one step up from marijuana,” he said, the drug was no longer a top concern for Washington.
But in Latin America, the drug was the main driver of terror and violence, killing and maiming civilians as it made its way to buyers mostly in the United States and Europe.
And cocaine use has been surging, health authorities say. Some 25 million people across the world used the drug in 2023, up from 17 million a decade earlier, according to U.N. figures. Consumption has increased 154 percent in the western United States and 20 percent on the East Coast since 2019, according to a drug-testing company, Millennium Health.
A group of State Department officials — calling themselves the CACA brigade, for Care About Cocaine Again — have argued that the United States should not lose sight of the drug. Cocaine trafficking, they said, caused instability that fuels domestic American issues, like mass migration.
Even if the U.S. ramped up its anti-narcotics efforts in Ecuador sooner, the lack of results in its broader war on drugs show the country may still have been flooded with cocaine, analysts said. Others noted that Washington only had so many resources.
“We can walk and chew gum at the same time, but we are putting out fires everywhere,” said Todd Robinson, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics from 2021 to 2025. “In the face of 100,000 Americans dying every year, our instructions were to figure out what to do about fentanyl.”
As violence crept up in Ecuador in 2022, Mr. Fitzpatrick received the call from Ecuador’s president, Guillermo Lasso, asking for help.
“Mr. President, it’s a good thing you are calling me early, before things get worse. I’ll see what we can do,” Mr. Fitzpatrick recalled telling the president.
Mr. Lasso was caught off guard. “Early?”
“Well, at least you don’t have bodies hanging off of bridges yet,” Mr. Fitzpatrick countered.
Days later, two corpses were found hanging from a bridge near a port city — a common show of force by Mexican cartels, but an ominous first for Ecuador.
The Drug War’s Resurgence
Once Ecuador had Washington’s attention, officials tried to act fast.
“It may have appeared that we missed the signals in Ecuador, but I don’t think that was the case,” said Mr. Robinson. “As soon as the level of violence skyrocketed there, we shifted law enforcement and security resources.”
The State Department’s anti-narcotics office in Quito went from one person in 2019 to nearly 30 last year, and U.S. aid — mostly security assistance — rose from $88.5 million in 2021 to $252 million in 2022.
Although the Trump administration has slashed U.S. spending around the world, the State Department said it had not cut any anti-narcotics efforts in Ecuador.
In 2023, Ecuadoreans elected a new president, Daniel Noboa, a billionaire. In office, he deployed soldiers into the streets and oversaw a crackdown that critics say undercut civil liberties.
Criminal groups have flexed too. In the last two years, they have kidnapped police officers, briefly seized a major television station and made car bombs, once a rare threat, a gory fact of life. In October, a blast ripped through a commercial center during evening traffic in the city of Guayaquil, killing one person outside of Mr. Noboa’s family offices.
Mr. Noboa decisively won re-election this year, and many military officials, watching Mr. Noboa meet Mr. Trump and court his allies this year, had pinned their hopes on U.S. help.
But even before November’s referendum, Mr. Trump’s interest in Ecuador was unclear. He removed Mr. Biden’s ambassador from the post in April and has not appointed a replacement.
“Sometimes you think this war is never going to end,” said a Navy commander who spoke on condition of anonymity, in line with security protocol. “The drug traffickers have the economic power and people will go wherever they get paid the most.”
Raids and Fears
Because Ecuador is an export hub for cocaine, the Navy is waging much of the battle. Its forces, like other militaries around Latin America, often feel outmatched.
Security spending rose 15 percent last year to reach $3.52 billion, but Navy officials say criminal groups seem to have endless weapons and funds. Young men, driven by poverty are easy gang recruits, while military training takes years. Corruption is widespread, and leaks have foiled missions before.
Those suspicions were on display one recent morning before a joint mission, as Navy troops and the police eyed each other warily. The authorities had received a tip about the whereabouts of gang members who were allied with a Mexican cartel and suspected of being involved in some recent bombings.
Under the moonlight, a commander shouted a pep talk — “Be agile, be quick, be safe, let’s go!” Some 250 naval forces and police filed into buses, trucks and armored personnel carriers.
The vehicles eventually screeched to a halt outside an apartment complex. Troops and police officers fanned out while a tactical unit raided the building.
From outside, an interrogation could be heard — slaps and shouts, a man yelling, “call my mother, don’t hit me!”
In the street lay a broken statue of Santa Muerte, a shrouded, scythe-wielding skeleton revered by many Mexican drug traffickers, the latest sign of cartels’ influence.
While the cartels’ power in Ecuador grows, so, too do their links with European mafias as the demand for cocaine rises worldwide.
When a senior American official recently relocated to Europe from Ecuador, he loaded his personal effects onto a cargo ship bound for Antwerp, one of the world’s largest seaports. When port authorities checked one of his containers, none of his belongings were inside, according to Mr. Fitzpatrick and the diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss a sensitive investigation. It became clear that the diplomat, whom the investigation cleared, had become a victim of “narco-pirates.”
All that remained in the container, he and Mr. Fitzpatrick said, were packages of cocaine.
Maria Abi-Habib is an investigative correspondent reporting on Latin America and is based in Mexico City.
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