Ecuador after its most violent year: the geography of risk runs through the ports

A country moving against the regional current

InSight Crime's annual round-up estimates that in 2025 there were at least 108,838 homicides in Latin America and the Caribbean, a regional rate of 17.6 per 100,000 inhabitants and more than 5% below 2024. Mexico fell by close to 20%; Chile, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador kept declining. Ecuador was the sharpest exception: 9,216 violent deaths, a rate of 50.9 and a 31% increase in a single year, the highest on the continental mainland.

For anyone operating in the country, the national average is of little use. What defines exposure is where and why the violence happens.

Where: the coast and the corridors to the sea

Guayas concentrated around 45% of the country's homicides; between January and November it recorded 3,771. Guayaquil alone accounted for 31.7% of all homicides nationwide. Los Ríos, a transit province between the highlands and the port, crossed the one-thousand-homicide mark for the first time at the end of November, up 55.8% on the same period of 2024. Manabí and El Oro complete the coastal picture.

The pattern is not accidental. The most violent provinces are those that connect the cocaine-producing areas of Colombia and Peru with Ecuador's Pacific ports, from which the drug leaves in containers for Europe and North America. The authorities attribute the increase to the fragmentation of criminal groups, drug and weapons trafficking and the pressure of transnational networks operating from those strategic ports. The violence is, to a large extent, the fight for control of that illegal supply chain.

Why the state of exception is not enough

Since 2024, Daniel Noboa's government has issued at least 17 state-of-exception decrees, and four coastal provinces have spent more than 550 days under that regime. In January 2026 a new one was decreed in nine provinces and three cantons, on the grounds that violence and organised crime not only persist but have intensified and spread territorially. The balance is uncomfortable: the same four provinces that have spent longest under exception broke their violence records in 2025.

The reason is structural. A state of exception allows the armed forces to deploy and rights to be restricted, which reduces certain opportunistic crimes and gives breathing room at critical moments. It does not change the economy that funds the groups — the flow of cocaine to the ports — nor the justice system's capacity to process detainees, nor control of the prisons, which in Ecuador have functioned as criminal command centres. Until those three variables change, military force contains spikes but does not reverse trends.

What it means for an operation

• Logistics and foreign trade: the main risk is not cargo theft but the contamination of containers with drugs, which exposes the company to sanctions, seizures and direct pressure from the groups on its port and transport staff.
• Extortion: in contested areas, payments demanded from shops and hauliers — the so-called vacunas — are the factions' local income and the crime with most contact with formal business.
• Staff: an employee's exposure depends not on their position but on where they live and travel. A risk map by canton is worth more than any national average.
• Continuity: states of exception bring curfews, military checkpoints and sudden road closures. Continuity plans must treat them as a normal operating condition, not an extraordinary event.

The national rate describes the country. The risk to an operation is described by the canton it sits in and the route it moves along.

The sign of improvement, when it comes, will not be a decree but a change in three indicators: a fall in homicides in Guayas and Los Ríos in absolute terms, the recovery of control over prisons, and a sustained decline in port seizures accompanied by less violence, not more. Until then, the map rules.