With its idyllic, hotel-dotted coast, Ecuador’s beach town of Salinas is the setting of a brutal war that most tourists never get to see.
Here, gangs forcefully enlist fishermen in drug trafficking — a scourge that has transformed one of the most peaceful countries in Latin America into one of its most violent.
“If you protest, you die,” a 35-year-old fisherman in the area told AFP of the gangs’ recruitment methods, which entail force and fear but also large payments — though not always everything they are promised.
The fisherman, who declined to give his name for fear of retribution, works at the Santa Rosa pier in the town of 35,000 inhabitants in Ecuador’s western Santa Elena province.
The atmosphere at the port is silent, tense.
“We can’t stay here long,” the fisherman told AFP while looking around nervously, explaining how he and others are given the choice between transporting cocaine for lucrative compensation, or being killed if they refuse.
Sandwiched between Colombia and Peru — the world’s top cocaine producers — Ecuador has seen violence explode in recent years as enemy gangs with links to Mexican and Colombian cartels vie for control.
Salinas is about 150 kilometers (93 miles) west of Guayaquil, the country’s biggest city and main commercial port for exporting drugs and the epicenter of clashes between gangs that fight bloody battles over trafficking routes to the United States and Europe.
As the gangs have gained ground, homicides in Ecuador soared from six per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018 to a record 47 per 100,000 in 2023.
In the first four months of 2024 alone, about 1,900 homicides were recorded.