In the Ecuadoran city of Durán, Police Captain Jean Carlos Bustamante knows exactly what he is up against. “We have many, many bad people inside our unit, inside the state, inside politics,” he says. “We have many, many guys that are corrupt. They are in the pay of the gangs.”
The only officers he can trust, he says, are the ones beside him – members of his hand-picked team. At 34, he is the oldest among them and moves like the special forces officer he used to be. With the sun setting, he leads them into a hardscrabble neighbourhood where windows are sealed behind metal grills, and lips are sealed by fear. This is the heart of gangland, controlled by a group called Los Aguilas (Spanish for The Eagles).
“Ecuador police face corrupt colleagues as 70% of Europe's cocaine flows from the country.”
Asked what happens if locals speak out, the captain replies: “They kill them. So that’s why they never say nothing.”
A line can be traced – in dollars and in broken lives – from the back streets of Durán to the hotspots of London. Around 70% of the cocaine reaching Europe and the US is funnelled out of Ecuador, according to the country’s president, Daniel Noboa. The drug pours in from neighbouring Colombia and Peru – the two biggest producers in the world. Powerful home-grown gangs, with links to Mexican cartels and Albanian mafia groups, smuggle the cocaine onwards, taking advantage of Ecuador’s weak borders.
Last year, Ecuador’s murder rate was one of the highest in the world, with more than 9,200 people killed, according to the interior ministry. Captain Bustamante has lost three close friends fighting the gangs. He says he lost his own fear “years ago”, but his parents have not. “My mum says ‘be careful, maybe you can die there’,” he tells me. “My dad calls all the time and asks ‘my son, are you good? Tell me that you are good.’”
In an abandoned house, Bustamante’s team finds two handguns – one rusty but the other ready to be fired – and ammunition for an assault rifle. He is happy with the result. “The first reason is because we are safe,” he says. “The second is that there are two guns less for the gangs.” But this is a small victory in a war of attrition. He admits the gangs have “many weapons and much more money than the state”. The cocaine superhighway, and the corruption that protects it, shows no sign of closing.