Voices column cites June emergency, U.S. border security agreement
The column, titled “When organized crime becomes government,” was published Monday in UPI’s “Voices” opinion section. Barrientos, who holds a degree in international relations from Argentina’s Universidad Católica de Salta and is a graduate of the Legacy of the Americas Academy of High Studies, wrote that Ecuador “is not a failed state” but that “in significant parts of the country, the question of who actually governs, does not have a clear answer.”
The piece traces Ecuador’s security posture to January 2024, when President Daniel Noboa declared an internal armed conflict against criminal gangs. Barrientos wrote that in June, Noboa imposed another 60-day state of emergency across 10 provinces and three municipalities, and that Ecuador has deepened security cooperation with the United States through joint operations and a new border security agreement.
The column describes continued violence in Manabi province, which Barrientos identified as a stronghold of Los Choneros. “The gangs have not been silent in response,” he wrote.
Barrientos’s central argument is that criminal organizations across Latin America now exercise functions that go beyond trafficking — controlling territory, penetrating institutions and imposing their own rules where the state is thin or absent. “A criminal group that moves cocaine across a border is a law-enforcement problem,” he wrote. “A criminal group that controls a neighborhood, buys off local officials, intimidates judges and recruits young people from the community is a challenge to sovereignty itself.”
The column invokes Colombia’s experience with Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel in the 1980s and the FARC’s later fusion of political insurgency with cocaine financing, and notes that Plan Colombia, launched in 1999, produced real gains against the insurgency. Barrientos wrote that the lesson still holds: dismantling one organization rarely ends the threat because weak institutions, absent alternatives and profitable illegal markets create openings for a successor.
He wrote that violence challenges the state from outside while corruption hollows it out from within and “often does the more lasting damage.” Barrientos described the conditions that allow criminal expansion — weak state presence, entrenched inequality, corruption and scarce economic opportunity — as having long made Latin America fertile ground for the pattern.
The column also references regional measures. Barrientos wrote that since early 2025, the United States has designated a growing list of Latin American cartels and gangs as foreign terrorist organizations, reflecting a judgment that some criminal networks now pose national-security challenges beyond ordinary law enforcement. He wrote that in March, leaders from roughly a dozen Latin American and Caribbean nations met in Florida to coordinate intelligence sharing and joint operations against cartel networks.
Barrientos argues that repression alone cannot reverse the erosion. “Police operations, stronger borders and professional security forces remain indispensable,” he wrote, “but arrests and seizures cannot by themselves restore the authority of institutions that citizens no longer trust.”
He frames Ecuador as the “test case playing out in real time,” writing that the country’s military campaign has degraded specific criminal groups without yet restoring, in the provinces most affected, the sense that the state is the only authority that matters. The gap, Barrientos wrote, “is where organized crime survives its defeats.”
The column closes with a distinction: “A government has not truly defeated organized crime merely by capturing criminals. It has defeated organized crime when criminals can no longer govern.”
UPI published the piece under its “Voices” opinion banner with a disclosure that “The views expressed are solely those of the author.”