White Powder in Black Markets

Two years ago today, Ecuadorian presidential hopeful Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated during a campaign stop. Nine others were wounded in the well-coordinated attack, which employed rifles, pistols and decoy grenades, and this just eleven days before the primary elections. As more details unfold from the ensuing investigation’s haze, there may be a Libertarian solution worth consideration as Ecuador copes with rising political violence.

Villavicencio, aged 59, survived by his wife and five children, had been a member of Ecuador’s National Assembly and was a strident voice against narcotraffickers now fighting for dominance in Ecuador. Two weeks earlier they had assassinated the young mayor of a major city, over the port of which two rival cartels are fighting. Currently the main competitors nationwide are syndicates from Mexico, Colombia and Albania. As far as is currently known, seven of the suspects detained at Villavicencio’s assassination have ties to narcotraffic.

Villavicencio’s antagonism of narcotrafficking interests draws many parallelisms to Colombian presidential candidate Luís Carlos Galán, assassinated in 1989 on the campaign trail. Galán also had been denouncing narcotraffickers’ growing influence in his country, so notorious kingpin Pablo Escobar ordered him silenced. Escobar himself was eliminated in 1993 during law enforcement’s attempt to capture him, but Colombia nonetheless endured many years of bone-chilling narcoviolence. Though things are much better nowadays than they had been during Escobar’s time, the billions of dollars invested over the years in prevention and interdiction often wound up strengthening the narcotraffickers, such as Plan Colombia, whereby the USA dispatched armaments to that country for combatting narcotraffickers, yet – surprise, surprise – many of those same armaments made their way into narcoguerrillas’ hands. Turns out that the more government tries to ban a product, the more the product’s price surges, making supply more profitable.

Volatile black markets often produce kingpins and mafias. When black marketers have no legal recourse for settling disputes, only the strongest and most ruthless can enforce their claims through street justice. Imagine, however, if government were just to legalize narcotics. In short order the mafias’ stranglehold on the market would evaporate as new firms race to the profitable industry. You would have safer streets, and safer homes, as the products’ quality and purity become more warrantable. Governmental allocations for interdiction can be slashed and redirected to public awareness campaigns for deterrence, since the citizenry should know that generally drug consumption is bad for one’s health.

It is too late for Fernando Villavicencio. We can only hope that those responsible for his murder are all apprehended and prosecuted to the law’s fullest extent. But beyond that, we can and should fervently hope that Ecuador avoids many years of instability by crippling the cartels via legalization!

Originally posted August 12th, 2023, on Facebook.