Madrid, Nov 5 (AFP/APP):Ecuadoran President Guillermo Lasso on Friday urged the United States to help fund its fight against the drug trade in the way it has done for years with neighbouring Colombia.
Nestled between Colombia and Peru, the world’s top cocaine producers, Ecuador has experienced a spike in homicides and other crimes related to rising narcotics seizures.
“Ecuador can not get ahead on its own,” Lasso, a conservative who took office in May, told a Madrid conference.
“I have started to think that it’s time for a ‘Plan Ecuador’,” he added in a reference to the “Plan Colombia” under which Washington has provided billions in military and other aid to fight drug trafficking.
Despite receiving more than $7.0 billion (6 billion euros) from the United States since 2000 as part of this plan, Colombia remains the world’s top cocaine producer.
It accounted for 64 percent of global production in 2019, according to figures from the latest report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Ecuador has in recent years gone from being a transit country where cocaine and other drugs pass through en route to the US and Europe, to a place where drugs are stored and processed.
“This is a new reality which the Ecuadoran government is facing, and it is causing insecurity in jails and on the street,” said Lasso who is on an official visit to Spain.
A war between rival drug gangs has sparked a surge in violence that has seen the homicide rate soaring from 7.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020 to 10.6 between January and October this year.
Lasso also defended the need for a law allowing the Andean country to forcibly take down illegal drug trafficking flights which were taking advantage of the fact that a third of Ecuador’s territory was not covered by radar systems.
Such a law would allow for “irregular flights that do not follow the orders of the state” to be “brought down”, he said, reiterating plans for Ecuador’s air force to shoot down unauthorised aircraft that reject the military’s orders.
Lasso vowed that by March 2022, radars will cover 100 percent of Ecuadoran territory.
He will end his visit to Spain on Saturday with a meeting with the country’s large Ecuadoran community.