Ecuador under major assault, another casualty of Biden's open borders
A political assassination of a leading presidential candidate by drug cartels last August was probably a warning of something very bad going on in Ecuador.
Now a full blown attack by the same drug lords -- on the state television station, on the police, on the jails, on the universities, on the highways, a few days after their leader escaped prison, pretty well makes it clear that the small Andean country is in a fight for its survival. The videos are violent, brutal and terrifying.
But why is this happening now? There have always been drug lords and their organized criminals, with the dynamic being stomp out one group and another arises because of it.
This is an unprecedented strength projected from cartel powers.
The only factor that explains it is Joe Biden's open border, which has not only allowed more than 100,000 Ecuadorean nationals to surge on through, along with 10 million others from other countries since Biden took office, but had also allowed for more lucrative drug smuggling for cartels, with costs of doing business cut for dealers as fewer drug dealers are captured and more slip through.
That's what made Ecuador's and Colombia's and Mexico's cartels powerful -- and Ecuador's government weaker.
InsightCrime notes that yes, there is a Mexican cartel border connection in Ecuador all right, and it's not pretty:
Mexican drug trafficking organizations sourcing cocaine from Colombian criminal groups have increasingly used Ecuadorian gangs and drug traffickers as intermediaries to transport the drugs from Colombia through Ecuador and onwards to Mexico and other international destinations. As a consequence, multi-ton seizures have become frequent in Ecuador.
Amid increased drug trafficking, Ecuadorian gangs have gained significant power, becoming more organized and violent. Gang warfare has given rise to multiple prison massacres that have killed hundreds of inmates, and gangs are now using explosives to carry out attacks, assassinating officials and politicians, and participating in an ever-expanding range of criminal economies. The homicide rate surged to an all-time high in 2022. In 2017, Ecuador’s homicide rate had been one of the region’s lowest.
The Mexican cartels are connected to the Mexican border in the north -- and have grown rich and powerful from human smuggling, migrant "crossing fees" which run into the thousands of dollars, and drug trafficking. They are making life hell in Mexico as money rolling in expands their power and reach. They have grown so big and strong on Biden's open borders they have branched out to other countries. particularly Ecuador.
The Biden administration has roused itself from its torpor to say the U.S. will help Ecuador, but won't send troops.
Other nations though, do see this as an unprecedented emergency and are sending troops, or considering it -- Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Argentina. Nobody wants a full blown narcostate in their vicinity, particularly the two states with Ecuadorean borders, Peru and Colombia, which already have dispatched elite troops to their own frontiers.
Tiny Israel, mired in a war of its own against terrorists, rapidly stepped forward and said it would help Ecuador any way it could, too.
Colombia's intentions are hard to read, given the radical leftwing orientation of its government, aligned as it is to Venezuela, which has threatened to stir up violence in countries with newly elected conservative governments -- which would be Ecuador and Argentina.
Also, Ecuador's president, Daniel Noboa, has said he would deport 1,500 foreign drug dealers, 90% of whom are Colombian, back to Colombia.
The rest of his response has been pure Israel-on-Hamas -- a vow to destroy these people he calls "terrorists," going after them with a single-minded ruthlessness which not only is redolent of Israel, but also resembles the acts of President Nayyib Bukele of El Salvador who got rid of his country's crime problem by jailing every last criminal and making a spectacle of them in their prisons. Noboa is doing the same thing now.
That brings us to where the problem came from and why it happened -- Joe Biden's open borders. Those open borders are not only destabilizing the U.S., they are destabilizing America's neighbors. Ecuador may not be the only country that suffers this nightmare fate as this Biden crisis goes on -- the country this level of violence eventually comes to may be our own, too.
Thanks, Joe.
Image: Twitter screen shot