Did the U.S. Focus on Fentanyl Leave Latin America Awash in Cocaine?
As Washington made combating fentanyl a priority, cocaine trafficking has surged. Nowhere have the ripples been felt like in Ecuador, where criminal groups have run rampant.
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.
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