US Support for Unraveling Security Condition in Ecuador Draws Comparisons to “Plan Colombia”

This article, written by Anastasia Austin, was originally published by Insight Crime, a Medellín-based foundation dedicated to the investigation and analysis of crime and security in Colombia and Latin America.

As Ecuador grapples with a security crisis, senior US military officials visited the country and signed a multimillion-dollar aid portfolio that is being compared to Plan Colombia. But does that comparison hold up?

A delegation that included General Laura Richardson, commander of US Southern Command, met with Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa and other high-ranking officials on January 22 to discuss US-Ecuadorian cooperation in the fight against organized crime.

The visit came less than two weeks after Noboa declared war on Ecuador’s gangs, who responded by wreaking havoc throughout the country. His administration has seen some success in the early days of militarization but lacks a long-term strategy and is struggling to finance the fight.

“We want to help Ecuador through this,” Richardson said in an interview with Ecuadorian news outlet Primicias.

So far, the United States has provided “critical” security and emergency response equipment and has promised a five-year aid portfolio including military equipment, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and capacity building. The aid package is worth around $93 million, Richardson told Primicias.

The United States has also agreed to increase military-to-military cooperation with Ecuador through joint operations, as well as increase intelligence sharing and the presence of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to counter the organized crime threat.

The agreement is being compared to Plan Colombia, a US security assistance program that spent close to $10 billion between 2000 and 2015, about 70% of which went to training, assisting, and equipping Colombia’s military.

While Plan Colombia had some success as a counter-insurgency strategy, especially against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia — FARC), it largely failed as a counter-narcotics strategy and did little to undermine organized crime.

InSight Crime Analysis

The US-Ecuador cooperation agreement contains some elements of Plan Colombia, but it is fundamentally different in size, scope, and commitment.

The cooperation plan includes increases in military-to-military cooperation, intelligence sharing, and training missions – all key characteristics of Plan Colombia. However, there is a significant difference in monetary size. The average annual aid package provided during Plan Colombia was close to $650 million per year, while the proposed aid to Ecuador does not even reach $100 million.

Moreover, while Plan Colombia funneled 70% of its funding towards military hardware, intelligence equipment, helicopters, training exercises, and security advisors, Richardson emphasized the US commitment to long-term goals in Ecuador, including capacity building and humanitarian aid.

Finally, while Ecuador has become a clear strategic priority in the region for the United States, the investment in Colombia also had a personal component for US audiences, according to experts.

“The Colombian reality was in the hearts and minds of politicians,” Dr. Jonathan Rosen, a professor of security policy and author of The Losing War: Plan Colombia and Beyond, told InSight Crime.

“Given its proximity to the United States and given the history, it was not hard to sell people on [Plan Colombia]. Colombia was on the average radar of the American citizen … It was not as ‘distant’ as Ecuador is.”

Yet Plan Colombia did little to disrupt organized crime in the country or the flow of Colombian cocaine to the United States or elsewhere.

“There was a lot of success capturing leaders,” Rosen said. “But Colombia still produces 90% of all cocaine coming to the United States. You’re still seeing a litany of corruption scandals … and you’re seeing organized crime fragment into all these different groups.”

Unlike Colombia, Ecuador has no guerrilla insurgency. Instead, the country faces a complicated criminal landscape where over a dozen groups fight for control of key drug trafficking routes and criminal economies, sometimes forming unstable alliances.

Its institutions are severely debilitated and corrupt, making intelligence sharing a double-edged sword.

“It’s not just worrying, it’s also limiting,” an official in Ecuador’s Interior Ministry who did not have authorization to speak on the record said of links between gangs and Ecuador’s security forces. “We have to understand that organized crime is not something alien to the state.”

What Ecuador needs, experts told InSight Crime, is institutional capacity building and social reforms.

“What we are doing now is not going to eliminate the root cause of the problem,” the Interior Ministry official said. “We are putting on band-aids … short-term measures that won’t stop the problem if there are no structural changes in how society functions and how the social fabric is managed.”

Any aid package must also come with oversight, experts said, including from the United States, as well as Ecuadorian government agencies, civil society groups, and journalists.

“If you give money to corrupt officials, they can squander it,” Rosen said. “There has to be accountability, there has to be transparency … [Get it] in as many places as you can.”

This article, written by Anastasia Austin, was originally published by Insight Crime, a Medellín-based foundation dedicated to the investigation and analysis of crime and security in Colombia and Latin America.

(Photo credit: Xavier Granja Cedeño – Cancillería Ecuador)