On the eve of a visit to Ecuador by U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, President Guillermo Lasso on Oct. 18 delivered a speech broadcast by the state channel EcuadorTV, in which he announced a 60-day state of emergency for the country, to deal with escalating drug-related violence. “Starting immediately, our Armed Forces and police will be felt with force in the streets because we are decreeing a state of emergency throughout the national territory. In the streets of Ecuador there is only one enemy: drug trafficking.… In recent years Ecuador has gone from being a drug-trafficking country to one that also consumes drugs.”
Ecuador, like many countries in Ibero-America, is seeing an explosion of drug trafficking and attendant violence as a result of the collapse of their economies, which leave their youth populations with next to no options for survival. This, coupled with the breathtaking pace of drug legalization in the United States, has left anti-drug forces in Ibero-America thoroughly demoralized about the prospect of actually defeating international narco-trafficking. As EIR has thoroughly documented in its book and subsequent studies of Dope, Inc., the international drug trade is run by the large City of London and Wall Street financial interests, which launder over a trillion dollars a year from their new Opium Wars.
Blinken, who is accompanied by the Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Todd Robinson, NSC Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere Juan Gonzalez, and Ned Price, will reportedly discuss security, defense and trade, and will focus as well on drugs and migration, with an emphasis on Venezuela and Haiti.
