How the U.S. Focus on Fentanyl Helped Fuel the Cocaine Trade’s Resurgence

Across Latin America, the resurgence of cocaine is wreaking havoc, terrorizing and killing civilians as cartels battle each other and the authorities to produce the drug and smuggle it to the United States, Europe and beyond.
Almost nowhere has been affected by this more than Ecuador, now the world’s largest exporter of cocaine. Once a hub of stability, Ecuador does not produce cocaine — instead it serves as a trafficking route for criminal groups operating in Colombia and Peru.
In 2022 and 2023, Ecuador nearly fell to an international consortium of drug traffickers: an alliance of Mexican cartels, Colombian guerrilla groups, European mafias and local gangs. In that war, Ecuador found itself alone, while the United States mobilized to scale up assistance and save its ally.
Officials and analysts attribute this in large part because the United States had prioritized combating fentanyl over other drugs in recent years. The thinking, according to officials, was that cocaine deaths were negligible in comparison to overdoses from opioids, and what limited resources there were needed to be directed to confronting those drugs.