The world is hungry for cocaine and happy to buy it. But think of the ravaged countries that pay the price | Roberto Saviano

The wave of brutality and terror by gangsters in Ecuador represented a drug coup'. And we are complicit in this violence and mayhem

What happened in Ecuador a few weeks ago, when the country descended into gang violence and TV journalists were seen by millions cowering in front of people pointing high-powered weapons at their heads, was described in many ways. With the benefit of hindsight, though, it can be defined as a drug coup". It had never happened in this form, on this scale, anywhere else. It was not comparable to the uprisings that came before. It did not resemble Gen Augosto Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973, and it had nothing to do with the rule of the Argentine colonels or the coup in Venezuela in 1992, because it did not aim to take power, or to occupy the government with ministers, or to replace formal control. The only goals of the drug-trafficking cartels are to force political and economic power to negotiate, to obtain impunity, to have room for manoeuvre to defend their own affairs and, ultimately, to remind politicians of any orientation that their legitimation is possible only by consent of the cartels.

Something similar - but with different methods and timing - did take place in Jamaica in 2010, when the then US president, Barack Obama, called for the extradition of Christopher Dudus" Coke, a powerful Jamaican drug boss, and his gangs rose up to prevent it. There were at least 75 deaths, but it was a momentary insurgency of the ghettoes ruled by Dudus. In 2021, there was also the assassination of the Haitian president Jovenel Moise, who was working towards handing over traffickers to the US in exchange for economic aid, and was killed by plotters who hoped to supplant him. All of these incidents have one element in common: when governments disadvantage the interests of criminal groups or favour the extradition of bosses, the cartels intervene with the same methods that they would use if they were facing criminal rivals - as equals.