Ecuador is the most megadiverse country per square kilometer in the world, it has 290,000 km2 of protected areas, more than its continental territory, which is just over 284,000 km2.
It is the first country that recognize the rights of nature in its constitution, and in popular consultations, proposals for environmental protection have triumphed, such as the popular consultation to eliminate oil extraction in the Yasuni. the largest biological reserve and protected area in the country in the Amazon, and underground or oil deposit, the elimination of gold exploitation in the Chocó Andino, a pre-protected area of the Province of Pichincha. and the no mining exploitation in watersheds.
In addition, Ecuador has 18 languages, and 24 indigenous nationalities, it was part of the Inca Empire and Quito was its second capital, the largest empire in the world in the 15th century, it was part of the Spanish Empire when it was the largest empire in the world since the 16th century to the 18th century, through the Royal Court of Quito, which included a territory that began in the Pacific and ended in Belem in the Atlantic following the course of the Amazon River in an area almost 5,500 km long by almost 500 km long. , that is, the Royal Court of Quito was larger than the Inca Empire, by almost 150 years.
It was part of Gran Colombia, the first mega country in South America, with exits to the Pacific and the Atlantic that included Venezuela, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador, that is, the Viceroyalty of New Granada plus a part of the Viceroyalty of Lima.
Today it is one of the smallest countries in South America, with many indigenous nationalities and native languages in danger of extinction, such as the Epera, Awá, Chachnis, and Tzachilas on the Coast, the Andoas in the eastern cloud forest, the Zaparos and Taromenani a uncontacted indigenous nationality in the Amazon.
That it lost half of its territory in a war over rubber with Peru, in which the United States financed and armed Peru, to invade Ecuador, which was the main supplier of rubber, tagua, balsa quinine, scopolamine, oil, pyrethrum to combat insects, soap and vegetable butter from Germany, since the 1930s and Germany and Japan. They became enemies of the United States in World War II.
Finally, after the Pedernales Earthquake, with 3,500 aftershocks for almost a year, especially in the provinces of Esmeraldas and Manabí, followed by the bad government of Lenin Moreno, the Covid-19 pandemic, and an unprecedented economic and social crisis, In the government of Guillermo Lasso, which had to disappear through cross-death, that is, early elections, Ecuador entered into a low-intensity civil war, called the Internal Armed Conflict, which is the continuation of the so-called War on Narcoterrorism, which the United States He fought it in Afghanistan, after the attack on the Twin Towers in NY. and where he faced the Taliban, the opium-producing narco-terrorists, who protected Bin Laden, and where he lost the war.
Since 2000, it has waged this War on narcoterrorism, also in Colombia, which was initially against the FARC, which it has forced to enter into a Peace Agreement, but the withdrawal of the FARC did not mean the end of the production and export of coca and cocaine, but quite the opposite and gave way to new narco criminal gangs, and to militarized drug cartels such as the ELN, the resilience of the FARC such as the OLIVER Simeterra commando, to the resilience of the AUC, the Colombian paramilitaries that formed the Cartel del Glofo, the Rastrojos, the Aguilas. They have allied themselves with the Mexican cartels, especially with the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel, to take this war from Colombia, to Mexico and to the Southern Border of the United States.
This war on drug trafficking has evolved into the Migration War, which is now being experienced inside and outside almost all Latin American countries, especially in North America, in which thousands of Latin Americans prefer to leave their countries that have become unlivable, violent countries. , and expensive, with runaway unemployment.
In this dramatic situation, since the Spanish Conquest, the problem of communicable diseases has been the weapon of war that has created a new order on the Continent.
In Ecuador, communicable diseases are no longer only caused by vectors, viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi, but there are also genetically transmissible diseases, others are metabolically transmissible such as hypothyroidism, but now we have psychologically and socially transmissible diseases, such as drug addiction. , depression, suicide, especially drug addiction, and violence, which have multiplied.
Since the 15th century. The American continent has experienced human plagues such as smallpox, measles, Spanish flu, malaria, dengue, leptospirosis, even onchocerciasis that came from Europe and Africa, which killed 90 percent of its native population. the indigenous person who lacked nutritional defenses
But the animals also suffered great mortality, rabies arrived, which destroyed many of the felines, or foot-and-mouth disease that in the 19th century caused the almost disappearance of cattle in Europe, and in America, the almost disappearance of cattle. game-like tapirs, deer, zaínos, etc., which almost became extinct on the continent.
The cattle plagues in Europe created the great migration of settlers to the United States, who invaded the indigenous territories of the Wild West, and then the territories of Mexico to create the current United States, but also invaded Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and the South of Brazil and Chile, changing the use of physical space, in which forests and local species were eliminated, such as buffaloes in North America or rheas in the Argentine pampas, to replace them with horses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens. The cultivation of grasses, corn, and wheat expanded. soy and barley, and pear for animal and human consumption.
Since the Colonial Era, when we were part of the Spanish Crown, the exploitation of gold and the expansion of the self-sufficient hacienda occurred, since, for the Spanish, the fertile lands, especially in the Andes, where there was abundant rainfall and water, a less unhealthy climate than on the Coast, the Amazon, or Europe, allowed the creation of self-sufficient paradises called haciendas.
In Europe, where plagues of all kinds were much more serious, for centuries, whether due to the climate with great variations, the roads of the Roman Empire, unhealthy feudal urban development, or navigation, Europe became one of the largest exporters of plagues and violence to the rest of the world.
In the Sierra of Ecuador, based on concertaje, self-sufficient paradises were created, called haciendas, where indigenous labor was abundant, as was the rain, but they altered indigenous nutrition, creating pests such as hypothyroism or goiter, in the Andes. , which added to the respiratory plagues favored by the cold and humidity, allowed the first influenza and Spanish flu in the 20th century to kill thousands, as smallpox, measles, and poliomyelitis did before.
The great indigenous mortality was what allowed miscegenation since mestizos were born with more immunological resistance and the enslavement of Africans on the continent.
Spain, a territory with few sources of fresh water, rivers, and ravines with streams, which was scarce in a peninsula like the Iberian Peninsula that was almost a desert, saw paradise in America.
In the Amazon, the arrival of the plagues with the Europeans and blacks from Africa, and their domestic animals, killed so many that the indigenous cities disappeared and the indigenous people who survived were those who practiced a semi-nomadic or nomadic life in the jungle.
In a second part of the Colony, Spain created global trade through the eighth of silver or doubloon, which allowed it to bring silk, porcelain, and spices from the Philippines and China, and bring sugar to Europe.
Inventing the great business of sugar production and trade gave rise to the first plantations in the American Continent.
Plantations were a new use of physical space in America, in which large areas of land were occupied by a single variety of plants, what today is called monoculture.
In the sugar plantations, which developed mainly in Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, and Paraguay, but also in Ecuador and the Peruvian coast, they gave rise to rum, brandy, and pisco. which was a non-perishable drug, most desired in the most alcoholic continent on the planet since the time of Rome, Europe.
The sugarcane plantations were followed by the plantations of another drug, tobacco, especially in Cuba.
In Ecuador after the wars of independence, trade to Europe was through England.
In 1822 it began to export, especially husk, which became the first export product of the new Republic of Ecuador in 1830.
Husk or quinine was a harvested product that did not need cultivation and became the main medicine in the world, which gave way to pharmaceuticals or pharmacies, which replaced the pharmacy, as it was the first medicine for global use. especially after Napoleon lost many soldiers in North Africa, since then, cascarilla was considered a weapon of war, since the army that possessed quinine could fight in the tropics, in the summer, in hot climates, in areas where the bite of the anopheles mosquito was dangerous.
England became the main producer and exporter of quinine in the world thanks to plantations in its colonies in Southeast Asia.
During the Second World War, England, and together with the United States, blocked Germany's supplies, which were mainly from Ecuador, and this hit Ecuador, which stopped being Germany's supplier.
Due to this blockade, Alemia created a synthetic derivative, called chloroquine, which made the quinine plantations disappear.
Today quinine is used in tonic water primarily as a muscle tonic and energy drink and in the favorite drink of the English, toncolins, or aguatónica.
Chloroquine and the production of synthetic drugs became the end of transcontinental herbal medicine and is now only a practice in the traditional medicine of the countries.
In Ecuador, since the end of the 19th century, the expansion of cocoa plantations occurred, which gave rise to the cocoa boom, which lasted until the First World War and brought with it the plantations, which were giant haciendas, different from the haciendas of the Sierra, where monoculture was practiced, this produced large-scale deforestation and with it pests such as mosquitoes and diseases such as malaria and yellow fever spread.
Ecuador became the first cocoa producer in the world and the focus of yellow fever in South America, which necessitated the presence of a health brigade from the United States, which had lost many workers to this disease in Panama, during the construction of the channel,
to combat yellow fever and malaria in Guayaquil, which since colonial times was the unhealthiest port in South America.
That's why the Rockefeller Mission arrived, with Isidodoro Noguchi, a Japanese doctor at the helm to clean up the port.
This expansion of cocoa, and its plantations, replaced the workers who fell ill with indigenous people from the Sierra, freed from the haciendas thanks to the Liberal Revolution of 1895, who migrated to the Coast. Thanks to the construction of the Quito-Guayaquil Train that spread the bubonic plague and malaria to the Andes as well.
The end of the cocoa boom came with the First World War, which hit France, our main buyer, and due to the spread of pests such as witch's broom and malaria.
Since the end of the First World War, and after the end of the cocoa boom, the Germans came to occupy the ports of Manabí and Esmeraldas, to extract rubber, tagua, balsa, soap, and vegetable oil through the famous Industrias ALES Industria Alemanas SA, based in Manta, and La Casa Tagua in Esmeralda, in the Sierra, from places near Quito, they obtained scopolamine, from a bush called guano, an antispasmodic for politics, but also a drug, called the drug of the truth, which produces hallucinations, and the loss of previous memory, turning prisoners into submissive people, who could confess secrets, accepted orders and then did not remember, today it is known as the drug of the first encounter, or rufous, popularized in the movies What Happened Yesterday.
They also obtained piereto, the insecticide, which is very important to this day, the pyrethroids, because they kill fleas and lice. In the trenches of World War I, more people were killed than bullets.
The pyreto and guanto plantations were extensive between the provinces of Pichincha and Cotopaxi, where the Germans produced pyrethroids and scopolamine, and today they produce food coloring in Guápulo, a neighborhood in the capital of Ecuador.
Being suppliers of rubber to Germany meant the loss of almost half of our country, which had more than 500,000 km2, most of it in the Amazonian territory, due to the defeat against the Peruvian army in 1941, supplied, directed, and trained by the American army.
In 1941 Ecuador signed the Treaty of Rio de Janeiró, in Brazil, when Peruvian troops were in the invaded Ecuadorian territory, which was part of the territory of the Viceroyalty of Lima.
This military victory gave Peru more than 260,000 km2 in the Amazon territory of Ecuador, which was close to the Amazon River.
The United States, Peru's ally, obtained the Galapagos Islands, where it established a military base that allowed it to control the southern Pacific, and the western entrance of the Panama Canal, to stop Japanese expansion.
The United States took possession of the Galapagos in 1941, but they were removed by Velasco Ibarra, the president of Ecuador who ignored the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro and removed them in 1946.
But in 2017, when Ecuador once again became an ally of the United States, during the so-called Drug Trafficking War, during the Government of Lenin Moreno, which reintroduced North Americans to the Galapagos.
The expansion of the banana plantations occurred after the Second World War, with the arrival of the transnational United Fruit, which had been escaping from Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and thanks to the arrival of automobile transport powered by gasoline and diesel, that gave way to roads on the Coast.
But the uncontrollable spread of the black Sigatoka plague in the plantations, plus the high price of the Panama Canal for banana ships, the recovery of plantations in Honduras, Nicaragua, or Guatemala, and finally an agrarian reform promoted by the United States in 1968 to prevent the spread of communism in the Andes, in 1968 they left the plantations of Ecuador in the hands of the Ecuadorian Luis Noboa Naranjo, who became the world's first exporter of bananas, and the largest landowner in the country, after ending with the banana plantations of ASTRAL, the heir to United Fruit in Esmeraldas.
Since the 1960s, Ecuador entered a period of alternating dictatorships, the governments of Velasco Ibarra and those of the radical liberal party that destroyed the country, after the loss of almost half of its territory in 1941.
In 1994, Ecuador entered the oil era, and the oil discovered in the Amazon was the main resource that financed the government, teachers, doctors, police, bureaucracy, and infrastructure.
Oil multiplied the state budget by 10 times and since then it has been the main resource of the Ecuadorian State. This changed the use of physical space, due to the development of road infrastructure and indigenous participation, since the Amazonian communities became part of the CONAIE, and their warrior spirit, changed the indigenous protest, turned the indigenous people into the group of opposition to the governments in power, which forced the government of Rodrigo Borja to give them territories, create bicultural education, allocate budget to sectional governments, to health infrastructure, finally the indigenous people became the main food producers and marketers of the country, participants in local elections, which has allowed them to have cantonal, parish, and provincial governments, to be actors in the national elections of Ecuador.
In the 1980s, Ecuador invented the export of shrimp, for which 200,000 hectares of mangroves were deforested. Ecuador was the main shrimp exporter in the world, until 1997 when the white spot plague arrived.
The shrimp crisis, the measures imposed by the IMF in the world, such as reducing the size of the State, less bureaucracy, no subsidies, free markets, privatizations, liberalization of fuel prices, etc., which led to bankruptcy in countries like Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador, Russia, or Argentina, and we entered the era of dollarization, with an enormous wave of migration, which took farmers and citizens from poor cities to the United States, Spain, and Italy.
It was the first mass migration of women, in a society where women had been the center of the family and urban coexistence, producing family fractures, expansion of poor neighborhoods, land invasions, and voluntariness, which changed the use of space.
The African palm, livestock, export flowers, logging companies, and banking grew and even created governments such as that of Absdalá Bucaram, who appointed the main banana exporter Alvaro Noboa as economy minister, and that of Jamil Mahuad, which was financed. by the logging companies with Peña Durini, and banks such as Filanbanco de los Isaias, El Progreso, and Banco de Guayaquil, by Guillermo Lasso. While the high price of oil allowed Correa to govern until 2016 when the price fell, and it experienced an earthquake,
after changing the use of the territory.
Dollarization allowed the laundering of narcodollars, the bankruptcy of shrimp farms, it creation of armed gangs on the Coast with those who were their armed guards, the trafficking of migrants to Central America, it creation the routes for fishing boats, that have subsidized fuel Even for the production of cocaine, the use of protected areas served for mining extraction, drug trafficking, and the manufacturing of mini-submarines because cocaine is now the country's most profitable export product.
The new roads and internet connections, ports, prisons, slums, and the international price allowed cocaine to boom.
In the new order, the population, oil, shrimp, fish, bananas, cocoa, and above all tourism were affected by the pandemic, the threat to the Chinese fishing fleet, drug trafficking, and emigration.
In Ecuador, dollarization turned money laundering, that is, drug laundering, into legal and illegal financial companies, in construction, and transportation, which are the fastest-growing companies in the country,
With the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies suffered a collapse, especially those in tourism, construction, and transportation. which were the ones that supported tourism, well, grand tourism. drug tourism. backpacker tourism, remittances, flowers, shrimp, and fish, along with oil, were those that saved dollarization and those that grew the most since 2000.
The increase in the price and demand for cocaine, especially in the United States and Europe, due to deaths from fentanyl, the legalization of marijuana, which stopped being a business of Mexico and Colombia, which became a business of the United States, Holland and other marijuana-producing countries, especially medicinal derivatives of marijuana, gave way to the drug trafficking cartels of America and Europe to use Ecuador as a drug marketing center, due to its proximity to Colonia and Peru, the main producers, for its beaches that allowed the embarkation and disembarkation of drugs, for the great expansion of its road network during the governments of Rafael Correa, for the ease of reaching North America in boats that are dragged by the Humboldt current, and for Ecuador's addition of indigenous Pacific seafaring cultures and the subsidy of fuel for fishermen. But the arrival of the Colombian, Mexican, and European cartels such as the Albanians, gave the export of cocaine another dimension, turning Ecuador into the main exporter of cocaine to Europe, which has led us to an internal armed conflict, a low-level civil war. intensity, which confronts Ecuador, the United States, and its NATO allies with the violent poor and the transnational cartels that sell, extort, or kill for drugs.
