At first light on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, small fishing boats fan out from the villages of San Mateo and Jaramijo, their bows pointed toward deeper waters and the promise of a good catch. Other boats come in from the rolling surf to battered coves, where crews unload baskets of tuna and swordfish and traders rush to inspect the day’s haul.
The Washington Post reported this week that the boats were struck as part of a covert CIA program. The crew of the Don Maca also reported being struck by a drone in Ecuadorean waters, according to accounts gathered by the Permanent Committee on Human Rights. The US government has claimed responsibility for those attacks and deaths. The Negra Francisca was usually anchored in San Mateo, a port town where most residents live in poverty.
Police and local people said fishermen who don’t cooperate are often forced to pay ‘fees’ of $1,200 per fishing trip – three or four times their earnings in an average month, locals say – or risk retaliation against themselves and their families. If they do transport cocaine, they can earn as much as $40,000 a trip, according to fishermen in San Mateo and Jaramijo, their relatives and police. Ecuadorean police estimate about 300 Jaramijo residents have been jailed in US and Salvadoran prisons on drug-trafficking charges over the last five years.
Two others it hasn’t claimed – but that bear all the hallmarks of US strikes – involved fishing vessels from Manabi province, according to Reuters interviews with three survivors from one attack and a dozen survivor accounts gathered by the Permanent Committee on Human Rights, a local advocacy group. The crew was then transferred at sea to a Salvadoran navy vessel, which took them to El Salvador, offered medical treatment, and flew crew members back home on commercial flights, according to the survivors and the rights group. In recent years, two of Ecuador’s most powerful criminal organizations – Los Choneros and Los Lobos – have expanded in coastal areas, forcibly recruiting fishermen for smuggling, according to Ecuadorean anti-narcotics officials, provincial police and residents. Asked about the alleged extortion, Ecuador’s national police said: “Some fishermen are forced to take part in these activities, exposing themselves both to law enforcement action and reprisals from the criminal organizations. They told a similar story – being picked up by people they believed to be Americans and turned over to a Salvadoran navy boat before they, too, were repatriated.
