Recently harvested bananas are washed at a farm in Los Rios, Ecuador on August 15, 2023. Bananas headed to a commercial port must meet long-established beauty standards of the export market.
The South American country is the world’s largest exporter of bananas, shipping about 6.5 million metric tons a year by sea. It is also wedged between the world’s largest cocaine producers, Peru and Colombia, and drug traffickers find containers filled with bananas the perfect vehicle to smuggle their product.
In addition to its proximity to cocaine production, cartels from Mexico, Colombia and the Balkans have settled in Ecuador because it uses the US dollar and has weak laws and institutions, along with a network of long-established gangs like Los Choneros that are eager for work. Bananas headed to Europe are boxed at plantations, loaded into trucks that take them to massive warehouses in and around Guayaquil and transferred to maritime containers driven to an area port.
Other traffickers have corrupted or intimidated police, customs agents, security guards and port workers to assist with—or ignore—tampering with containers at the ports. National Police Gen. Pablo Ramírez, Ecuador’s national director of anti-drug investigations, attributed the change to increased smuggling, not better enforcement.
The operator of the largest port in Guayaquil, Contecon Guayaquil S.A., turned down Associated Press requests for an interview and access to the port to see existing security procedures. In response to written questions about the measures, spokeswoman Alexandra Pacheco said in a statement that the operator entered into an agreement with the National Police in 2022 to among other things “reinforce operations in the port.