Ecuador destroys over 21 tons of cocaine in largest drug seizure in its history PHOTO/VIDEO

Authorities in Ecuador on January 25 began the destruction of the largest drug seizure in the country’s history: 21.5 tons of cocaine found over the weekend in the basement of a rural farmhouse.

Ecuador’s record seizure, worth about $1 billion on international markets, will be destroyed using an encapsulation technique in which the cocaine is crushed and mixed with cement, sand and other elements until its properties are neutralized, La Prensa Latina reports.

The process will take about eleven hours, at a rate of about two tons of drugs destroyed per hour, which according to the Ministry of the Interior is sixteen times faster than incineration and more environmentally friendly.

Seventeen firearms, nearly 5,400 bullets of various calibres, and fourteen magazines, among other items, were also seized in the same Armed Forces operation in the municipality of Vinces, in the tropical province of Los Ríos.

Authorities believe that this warehouse was an important drug storage point for a drug trafficking network, as Vinces is a transit point to the port city of Guayaquil and other coastal locations in Ecuador from where drugs are dispatched to North America and Europe.

The National Director of Anti-Drug Investigation of the Ecuadorian Police, William Villarroel, explained that the blocks of cocaine seized had up to six different markings, presumably to identify the various criminal structures to which they were destined.

Villarroel also noted that over 30 tons of cocaine have already been seized in Ecuador since the start of 2024, more than double the amount seized during the same period of 2023.

Central hub in the global cocaine trade

Surrounded by Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest cocaine producers, Ecuador has become in recent years a key point in the global cocaine trade, with mafias using its ports and coasts to ship tons of the narcotics to Europe and North America.

As a result, the country has become the world’s third-largest seizer of drugs after Colombia and the United States, with more than 200 tons of drugs seized each year for the past three years.

At the same time, organized crime gangs dedicated primarily to drug trafficking have become so powerful that the government of President Daniel Noboa declared an “internal armed conflict,” in which the gangs are now legally considered terrorist groups and belligerent non-state actors.

The gangs, some of which have links to Mexican cartels and Eastern European mafias, are accused of being behind a wave of attacks and violence in recent weeks, including the kidnapping and murder of police officers, bombings, the burning of vehicles, prison riots in which some 200 people were held hostage, and the seizure of a television station by an armed group.