The Niño phenomenon of 1982 flooded the coastal plains of the Ecuadorian coast. In the mangroves and river mouths, estuaries multiplied, where shrimp grew by the thousands, which motivated investors to create shrimp farms, which were places where shrimp larvae were raised until they were of commercial size, which for the general ranged from 7 to 15 centimeters. The largest of the shrimp species that grew in estuaries such as the Chamanga Estuary, which is 3 km wide and more than 50 km inland, was the zebra shrimp, or prawn, which did not grow in pools, but in 4 other varieties if they did.
Building a shrimp farm was possible with heavy machinery such as backhoes in a few days. For this, those who wanted to build shrimp farms first had to corrupt the military from the Navy, who guarded the coasts and protected the mangroves.
León Febres Cordero hypocritically declared mangroves protected areas, so that only his friends could cut them down, including his successor in the Guayaquil Mayor's Office, Jaime Nebot, who was his darling.
Secondly, they had to get some neighbors to start felling the mangrove, it was someone who lent his name for a few sources, the Ecuadorian currency of those times, and he lied saying that he was occupying it as an owner, with crops, and who sold his property.
My father-in-law Don Ramón, who was the provincial fishing inspector, did not allow himself to be corrupted and was happy, like a modest bureaucrat, who walked three kilometers daily from his house in the center to the fishing inspectorate through the Delfina Torres Hospital. he was going to inspect the area in question. But it was the sailors who guarded the mangroves, the corrupt ones from those years until now. They lied saying that what the invader said was true, in exchange for bribes, they even invaded mangroves and built shrimp farms before or after they retired from the army, which made it almost impossible to prevent the invasions.
Thus, most of the 200,000 hectares of shrimp farms were built illegally, which made us the world's leading producer of this food.
Shrimp ponds and their owner's needed larvae, concrete dams, special balanced food, and pumps to suck up seawater.
To make a shrimp farm produce, an investment equivalent to 6,000 dollars was needed now, which in sucres was approximately 6 million sucres, when the minimum living wage in Ecuador was 80 USD and rose to 120 usd, that is, to almost 120,000 sucres, at the time by Rodrigo Borgia.
The advantage of a shrimp farm was that it could be harvested every 3 to 6 months, depending on the month, preferably between January and June, when the El Niño current arrives. Each hectare produced 60,000 dollars per harvest and per hectare, with only two to 5 employees, for every 100 hectares of which 4 were armed guards, with long weapons and pistols. This turned the shrimp farmers into mafia bosses, who had their own hitmen or guards, and who took justice into their own hands when they were robbed, or when they were in danger.
For the residents of the shrimp farms, there was generally no work, they preferred thugs from the then-most violent province in Ecuador, Manabí. Some of these thugs organized to get fired and created the drug cartel, called Los Choneros, which started out as shrimp robbers.
The drug cartels discovered that they could hide drug packages in shrimp pools, where police dogs could not smell them, and that for export, they could do so in refrigerated boxes and containers, which carried shrimp.
The shrimp farmers benefited the residents of the shrimp farms by buying larvae, which they collected along the Ecuadorian coast, using red, micrometric nets that killed all animals near the beaches, which became a pestilential cemetery of crabs, crabs, many varieties of small fish, which produced devastation and a massive extinction, in which more than 120,000 families, with parents and school children, were killing marine animals day and night, during floodwaters, for 15 days each month, all for get a small number of larvae, which they sold in crystal glasses to shrimp farmers for large sums of money, but they earned 10 times more than a worker. The ovate female shrimp were the favorite prey, up to 50 dollars were paid for them, because each one had up to 300,000 larvae.
The crazy profits of the larvae and shrimp fishermen ended up in bars, brothels, VHS televisions, and porn movies, drugs that were the most sold.
