By Jorge Rolón Luna *
Is it feasible to argue that Ecuador and Paraguay, each on its own and to different degrees, through correlated events are showing us in recent years their entry into what is called “contemporary violence.” On April 29 of this year, Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency in three provinces ravaged by drug trafficking violence, expressed in a spike in homicides, growing contract killings and massacres in prisons. The response of the unimaginative Ecuadorian president has been the mobilization of 4,000 police and 5,000 military personnel in these provinces -in some communes with curfew included-, as if he had never heard of Mexico’s failure in the “war against drugs”. On May 10, thousands of kilometers away from the country, the Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci was brutally murdered. What is happening in Ecuador, what is happening in Paraguay? Although these diverse violent phenomena are, in turn, multi-causal, one word is key to begin to understand the issue: cocaine. The game changer.