Photo by Diego González

Ecuador, once one of the most peaceful countries in Latin America, is now one of its most dangerous. The murder rate in 2020 was 7.7 homicides per 100,000 people. That was roughly comparable to the United States where it was 6.4 that year. In nearby Brazil, on the other hand, it was 22.3.

By 2023, Ecuador’s homicide rate had leapfrogged over its neighbors to an astounding 46 per 100,000. In a mere three years, the number of murders had increased six-fold.

The reason: narcotraffickers. Ecuador had become a convenient transshipment hub, and various gangs were warring over territory, particularly in coastal cities.

In 2023, in a presidential election that featured the assassination of one of the candidates, Ecuadorians voted in Daniel Noboa, an undistinguished but telegenic conservative politician who promised an iron-fist approach to fighting drug kingpins. His tactics boiled down to unleashing the military to attack specific gangs. However, as Tiziano Breda points out in a report for ACLED, “the same measures that contributed to reining in violence in the first months of 2024—increased military pressure in prisons and on the streets—had the unintended consequence of further fostering intra-gang power struggles and fragmentation.”

As a result, homicides in Ecuador have superseded even the totals for 2023, with the expected rate rising to 50 per 100,000 in 2025.

All of which makes the result of the recent referendum all the more remarkable.

Last week, Ecuadorians rejected all four of the proposals coming from the Noboa government. In addition to preserving the “rights of nature” provision of their constitution—by rejecting a constitutional overhaul—Ecuadorians said no to foreign military bases. The Trump administration was practically salivating at the prospect of returning to a U.S. base in Ecuador that the military had been kicked out of in 2009 when then-president Rafael Correa let the lease expire.

Even in a country where people are dying left and right, voters overwhelmingly opposed any outside military intervention to address the problem of........

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