If you want something to thrive, like poverty, terrorism, or drugs, have the government declare war on it. From Ted Galen Carpenter at antiwar.com:
An especially hot news item in 2024 has been the surge of drug-related violence in Ecuador. Until recent years, Ecuador was hailed as an island of relative stability in the swirling violence of the illegal drug trade in the Western hemisphere. The situation there contrasted with the level of chaos and violence in neighboring countries such as Peru and Colombia, as well as the central arena of drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America. American retirees found the country to be an especially appealing destination.
That presumption of stability was always somewhat exaggerated. In Ecuador violent criminal gangs “have existed for decades,” security analyst David Saucedo notes, “but with the arrival of the Mexican cartels, such as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), they made local alliances, and in this way, they became their operating arms for drug trafficking.”
The notion of today’s Ecuador as one of Latin America’s safer countries is a tenacious episode of nostalgia. The murder rate in that country has soared from 6.9 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019 to 26.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, and preliminary statistics indicate that the upward trend is continuing. When voters elected Daniel Noboa president in October 2023, he made it clear that he would take an especially hard line against the drug cartels. Drug policy experts now talk about Ecuador with similar degrees of concern that they had reserved for Mexico and other central players in the drug trade.
Even members of the political elite in Ecuador are increasingly vulnerable to the violence. One prominent candidate in the October 2023 presidential election was assassinated just eleven days before the balloting. Shortly thereafter, Ecuador’s youngest mayor, Brigette Garcia, was kidnapped and murdered in the coastal town of San Vicente. Following the January 2024 unrest, new President Daniel Noboa declared an “internal armed conflict” and ordered national security forces to neutralize more than 20 armed groups classified as “terrorists.”
If the government were to take over the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand in five years.
Milton Friedman
They couldn’t run a brothel on the grounds of a sawmill.
Dixie Grammaw
If weed was legal I might smoke it said while smoking a party blunt. (h/t-AL)