Drug cartels exploit banana industry to ship cocaine

GUAYAQUIL (AP):

Men walk through a lush plantation between Ecuador ’s balmy Pacific coast and its majestic Andes, lopping hundreds of bunches of green bananas from groaning plants twice their height.

Workers haul the bunches to an assembly line, where the bananas are washed, weighed, and plastered with stickers for European buyers. Owner Franklin Torres is monitoring all activity on a recent morning to make sure the fruit meets international beauty standards – and ever more important, is packed for shipment free of cocaine. Torres is hypervigilant because Ecuador is increasingly at the confluence of two global trades: bananas and cocaine.

The South American country is the world’s largest exporter of bananas, shipping about 6.5 million metric tons (7.2 tons) a year by sea. It is also wedged between the world’s largest cocaine producers, Peru and Colombia, and drug traffickers find containers filled with bananas the perfect vehicle to smuggle their product.

Drug traffickers’ infiltration of the industry that is responsible for about 30 per cent of the world’s bananas has contributed to unprecedented violence across this once-peaceful nation. Shootings, homicides, kidnappings, and extortions have become part of daily life, particularly in the Pacific port city and banana-shipping hub of Guayaquil.

“This is everyone’s responsibility: the person who transports it, the person who buys it, the person who consumes it,” vendor Dalia Chang, 59, a lifelong resident of Guayaquil, said of the cocaine trade. “They all share responsibility. They have ruined our country.”

The country, which is not a major cocaine producer, was especially rattled when a presidential candidate known for his tough stance on organised crime and corruption – Fernado Villavicencio – was fatally shot at the end of an August 9 campaign rally. He had accused the Ecuadorian Los Choneros gang and its imprisoned leader, who he linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, of threatening him and his campaign team days before the assassination.

In addition to its proximity to cocaine production, cartels from Mexico, Colombia, and the Balkans have settled in Ecuador because it uses the US dollar and has weak laws and institutions, along with a network of long-established gangs like Los Choneros that are eager for work.

The authorities say Ecuador also gained prominence in the global cocaine trade after political changes in Colombia last decade. Coca bush fields in Colombia have been moving closer to the border with Ecuador due to the breakup of criminal groups after the 2016 demobilisation of the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better-known by their Spanish acronym FARC.

A record 2,304 metric tons of cocaine was manufactured in 2021 aroun d the world, mostly in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. That year, nearly a third of the cocaine seized by customs authorities in Western and Central Europe came from Ecuador, double the amount reported in 2018, according to a United Nations report citing data from the World Customs Organization. Large drug busts have become more frequent, and within the past month, European authorities have made record-setting busts after inspecting containers carrying bananas from Ecuador.