How the idyllic Galapagos Islands became staging post in world drug trade

Charles Darwin once described Isabela as "the most desolate of the Galápagos Islands".

Now, more than 100,000 tourists visit the white sandy beaches of this "almost extraterrestrial outpost" every year, said The Washington Post, with the crowds attracted by "the giant tortoises and marine iguanas found nowhere else in the world". 

But the "beloved Unesco World Heritage site" is being pulled into "the booming drug trade consuming much of Latin America". Last year the US navy seized nearly 25 tons of cocaine around the Galápagos Islands, reported Samantha Schmidt and Arturo Torres for the paper: a 150% surge from the year before, and up from just one ton in 2019. 

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The idyllic islands have become known as the "petrol station of the Pacific", said The Daily Telegraph, where traffickers stop to refuel. Smugglers are increasingly turning to long ocean routes to smuggle drugs out of the continent via Ecuador, and meet growing global demand for cocaine. 

Ecuador was once a peaceful "symbol of stability", but violence and drug activity there has skyrocketed in recent years, said Graham Keeley for the i news site, as gangs vie for control of trafficking networks. It plunged into further chaos this month when gangs declared violent war on the government, in revenge for new President Daniel Noboa declaring a state of emergency following the escape of the country's most notorious drug trafficker. "We are in a state of war," Noboa has said.

Ecuador, the new cocaine capital

Ecuador "was once spared the worst of the narco-warfare and insurgencies that have plagued Latin America", wrote Niko Vorobyov in The Spectator. "No longer."

"Strategically positioned next to Colombia and Peru", the world's most prolific cocaine producers, Ecuador has long acted as a transit point for traffickers moving the drug from South to Central America, said Vorobyov, freelance journalist and author of "Dopeworld". 

But the 2016 peace process in Colombia, and disbanding of the Farc rebels, "left a cartel-shaped hole in the drug trade that was swiftly filled by Mexican narco-traffickers", he wrote. 

Amid tightening security in Colombia, these gangs looked for easier ways to ship drugs to Europe or Australia, said Keeley for the i news site, where profits are higher than in the US. 

They subcontracted Ecuadorian gangs for shipping, said Vorobyov. By 2019, "as much as a third" of Colombian cocaine was leaving through Ecuador's port city and economic capital, Guayaquil. 

Some, bound for Australia, Europe and North America, "was hidden among cargos of Ecuador's most prized export: bananas", said Vorobyov. "If you used cocaine this week," he concluded, "there's a good chance it came through Ecuador".

Galápagos Islands, the 'petrol station of the Pacific'

In an attempt to evade Ecuador's crackdown, and "stricter US patrols in the Caribbean and North Atlantic", drug gangs have "turned to the Galápagos route" through the Pacific, said The Telegraph. 

Boats are "harder to detect and trace in open seas", said the paper. But this 600-mile detour means the vessels must refuel, and "the secluded labyrinth of waterways through the 127 islands" offers "the perfect cover".

Many fishermen around the islands are "taking advantage of government-subsidised fuel" to engage in "the lucrative business of gas smuggling", Samantha Schmidt and Arturo Torres reported for The Washington Post. 

Navy officials told the paper that fishermen who save their discounted fuel for smugglers can earn up to $30,000 per job. "Lots of people have become millionaires off of this," one anonymous fisherman told the paper. 

The vast waters around the islands are extremely difficult for authorities to monitor. Ecuador is responsible for nearly 500,000 square miles of ocean, about five times the size of its land mass. US presence on the coastline is "minimal", added Schmidt and Torres, since former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa "ousted" US forces from a military base near the port city of Manta. 

Correa's decision "was like an invitation to the drugs gangs", Carlos Malamud of the Madrid-based think-tank Real Elcano Institute told the i news site. 

The cash-based local economy on the islands also creates "ideal conditions for money laundering", said Schmidt and Torres, while airports and docks "have little to no security". Many inhabitants are "afraid to report" illicit activity, as everyone knows each other in the small population. Drug trafficking on the archipelago is an "open secret". 

"Little by little, the drugs are taking over the island," one inhabitant of Isabela told the paper. "And there is no help."