Durán, a municipality of over 300,000 inhabitants in Ecuador’s coastal Guayas province, has undergone a dramatic transformation from a thriving commercial center to a violent hub of criminal activity.
Anastasia Austin*
This shift reflects broader challenges facing Ecuador and offers critical insights into the complex interplay of social, economic, and criminal factors shaping security in the country.
Once known for being a commercial hub and small industrial center on the outskirts of the port city of Guayaquil, Durán is now better known for its rampant organized crime violence. Today, the municipality grapples with systemic corruption, extreme poverty, and widespread criminality. Durán has become a key staging area for cocaine trafficking and a hotbed for the local drug trade. In 2023, its homicide rate hit a staggering 147 per 100,000.
The roots of Durán’s crisis lie in its unchecked growth and governmental neglect. Rapid, unplanned urbanization has outpaced the development of crucial infrastructure. The absence of adequate schooling, including a public university, has limited opportunities for youth. These conditions have created a vacuum that criminal organizations are all too eager to fill.
Meanwhile, Ecuador’s growing role in transnational drug trafficking has fundamentally altered criminal dynamics in Durán, which acts as a strategic corridor for cocaine shipments leaving for Europe and the United States via Guayaquil’s ports.
The outsized profits from this trade have trickled down to local criminal actors in Durán, who act as service providers for larger national networks. Two central criminal players, the Chone Killers and the Latin Kings, dominate Durán’s underworld. Their violent rivalry for control over territory and criminal economies has reshaped the municipality’s landscape. The groups’ connections to transnational networks appear opportunistic rather than systemic, but their infiltration of local government is particularly alarming. At least one group has secured public works contracts and control over key institutions, blurring the lines between criminality and governance.
These groups have also embedded themselves in Durán’s communities and secured control over whole neighborhoods, primarily through land trafficking. This practice forms the backbone of Durán’s criminal ecosystem, providing not only profits from illegal property sales but also staging grounds for other illicit activities, like retail drug trafficking, robbery, and extortion. The process of legalizing these settlements offers opportunities for money laundering and often leads to violence, including against public officials.
The influx of cocaine profits has only enabled state penetration further, allowing local groups to evolve into sophisticated criminal enterprises, start legitimate businesses, and capture key posts in the municipal government. Once a bustling railroad depot and industrial hub, Durán is now the poster child for Ecuador’s rapid decline into the criminal abyss.
*This article is part of an investigation exploring criminal dynamics in Durán, Ecuador’s primary organized crime hotspot and one of the world’s most violent cities in 2023. Read the other chapters of the investigation here or download the full report (PDF) here.
*Article originally published in InSight Crime.
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