Criminal Order, Ports, and Coca Booms: The Onset, Amplification, and Persistence of Ecuador’s Territorial Homicide Divide (2014–2025)
This article utilizes administrative microdata and difference-in-differences event studies to demonstrate that Ecuador's territorial homicide divide between the Coast and the interior emerged in late 2020, amplified through 2023, and persisted through 2025 as a result of a transnational coca supply shock that was transmitted only after the prior collapse of the country's criminal order.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Violence in a country is rarely a single, uniform wave that crashes over the entire land at once. Instead, it often moves like a tide, rising in some places while receding in others, driven by the specific geography and the hidden rules of the people who control those spaces. In the study of organized crime, researchers have long understood that the mere presence of illegal markets, such as the trade in cocaine, does not automatically guarantee a spike in killings. For violence to explode, something else must happen: the delicate, often invisible agreements that keep rival criminal groups in check must break down. When those arrangements collapse, competition turns lethal, and the violence that follows is not random; it concentrates in the places that matter most to the trade, such as ports and transport corridors. Understanding exactly when and why this shift happens is crucial, because it tells us whether a crisis is caused by a sudden change in government, a new wave of drugs, or the internal fracture of the criminal world itself.
A new study of Ecuador, a country that once enjoyed one of the lowest rates of violent death in South America, offers a precise map of how such a crisis unfolds. Between 2010 and 2018, the nation had successfully reduced its homicide rate to roughly 5.8 deaths per 100,000 people. Just five years later, that number had surged past 45 per 100,000, accompanied by prison massacres, the assassination of a presidential candidate, and armed takeovers of media outlets. Yet, looking at the national average hides a deeper truth: the violence did not spread evenly. It created a sharp divide between the coastal provinces and the rest of the country. To understand this split, researchers Juan Pablo Jaramillo-Ramón, Juan Federico Pino-Uribe, and Juan Manuel Caicedo-Atehortúa examined nearly 40,000 individual records of intentional homicides from 2014 to 2025. They did not just look at the total numbers; they broke the data down by month, by quarter, and by specific towns to trace the exact moment the coast's trajectory diverged from the interior's.
The researchers found that the split began in the final quarter of 2020. This timing is significant because it rules out several popular explanations for the crisis. The divide opened before the new president took office in May 2021, meaning the change in government was not the trigger. It also began before the assassination of the leader of a major criminal group, Los Choneros, which occurred in late December 2020. Instead, the evidence suggests that the assassination was not the starting gun but rather a loud event in a process that was already underway. The criminal order that had kept violence contained was already eroding in the second half of 2020, and the killing of the leader was a symptom of that collapse rather than its cause. Once the divide opened, it did not close. The gap in violence between the coast and the interior grew steadily through 2023 and remained wide through the end of 2025, showing no sign of returning to the previous, calmer state.
The study also investigated the role of the cocaine supply, which comes primarily from Colombia. Colombia experienced two major surges in coca cultivation during the period studied: one from 2014 to 2019 and a second, larger one from 2020 to 2025. If the violence in Ecuador were simply a mechanical reaction to the amount of drugs passing through its ports, both surges should have produced the same result. They did not. During the first boom, the level of cocaine production had no connection to the homicide rates on the coast. The criminal groups were able to handle the increased flow without a spike in lethal violence. However, during the second boom, the relationship changed completely. As the supply of cocaine grew, the homicide rate on the coast rose in lockstep. This suggests that the violence was not caused by the drugs themselves, but by the state of the criminal order. Once the old arrangements had broken down, the same ports that had previously handled the trade quietly became the battlegrounds for a new, chaotic competition.
The researchers also looked at how close towns were to the nearest seaport. They found that towns closer to the ports did see higher violence, but this effect was largely absorbed by the fact that they were on the coast. Being part of the coastal region mattered more than the specific distance to a single port, suggesting that the entire coastal zone had developed a complex set of conditions—infrastructure, urban density, and criminal networks—that made it uniquely vulnerable once the criminal order fractured. The study concludes that the crisis in Ecuador is not a single event but a process with three distinct phases: the onset, where the criminal order breaks; the amplification, where the gap widens due to competition and weak state control; and the persistence, where new criminal structures take root and keep the violence going. The findings show that to understand such a crisis, one must look beyond the surface of the numbers and identify the precise moment when the rules of the game changed.
Drowning in papers in your field?
Get daily digests of the most novel papers matching your research keywords — with technical summaries, in your language.