This narrative to explain Ecuador’s sharp escalation of organized-crime violence—repeated by a BBC report this week is… kind of correct, sort of?

I don’t mean to single out the BBC: you see this “cocaine surged, then homicide rates multiplied” idea repeated a lot. There’s something to it. But it misses a lot.

Cocaine seizures (from the UNODC World Drug Report) point to trends. That data, for Ecuador, does show a big jump in the amount of cocaine transiting the country from 2020 to 2021.

However, the numbers also show that there was already a lot of cocaine flowing through Ecuador during the 2010s, when the country was regarded to be among the least violent in the Americas.

The correlation between narcotrafficking and violence exists, but its strength often gets overestimated. A larger part of the story seems to have to do with the structure of organized crime in Ecuador.

Peaceful arrangements among criminal groups, which involved corrupt people high up in government (as prosecutors are uncovering), fell apart sometime around the turn of this decade. The river of cocaine that was already flowing through Ecuador fell into bitter dispute as past equilibria shattered.

The demobilization of Colombia’s FARC probably contributed to that. An early indicator of trouble was an extreme wave of prison violence between fast-growing gangs in the late 2010s and early 2020s, signaling a big shake-out among the country’s organized crime groups. There may have been a perfect storm of factors within the criminal underworlds of Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador, and perhaps elsewhere.

No matter what, the explanation rests on more than just a jump in the flow of cocaine. That flow was already quite robust, and quite tolerated by corrupt people in Ecuador’s security forces, judiciary, and government institutions.