A $1.2 billion terminal was meant to shield Ecuador’s coast from traffickers. Instead, cocaine seizures have tripled, homicides have soared, and European ports now flag Posorja as a prime origin, exposing how gangs and corruption outpaced technology and ambition.
From Fishing Village to Front Line
Six years ago, Posorja was a sleepy fishing town where families lived off shrimp, tuna, and tides. Then came the cranes. The Dubai-based conglomerate DP World won a 50-year concession to build Ecuador’s first actual deep-water port. Cameras and biometrics guarded its gates, and enormous scanners promised to expose contraband before it left the shore.
The transformation was swift. Posorja became one of Ecuador’s busiest maritime hubs in 2024, welcoming Maersk and other global lines. It also became something else: a magnet for cocaine, according to figures shared with OCCRP 15.4 tons of cocaine were intercepted in the district in 2024—nearly three times the year before. Homicides multiplied thirteen-fold compared to the five years before the port’s opening.
Residents told reporters that two or three killings a week have become routine. “It used to be a place of peace,” one resident said. “Now shops close earlier, and everyone is afraid.” European ports, the final destinations of these drug shipments, now flag Posorja as a prime origin, exposing the global reach of the issue.
What was billed as a fortress against smuggling turned Posorja into a frontline in Ecuador’s drug war.
Security by Design, Exploited in Practice
Posorja was supposed to be the antidote to Guayaquil, Ecuador’s historically porous port. But traffickers proved quicker than the algorithms. Within months of opening in 2019, cocaine stashed among bananas and flowers was already slipping through. By 2024, customs in Rotterdam—the bellwether of Europe’s cocaine trade—logged Posorja as the top Latin American loading port for seizures, more than doubling Panama and even outpacing Guayaquil. Antwerp saw 14.6 tons linked to Posorja that year. German officials in Hamburg and Bremerhaven also flagged the new hub as a growing origin.
Analysts told OCCRP the math was simple: a competitive port with fast connections to Europe is automatically attractive to criminal networks. DP World insists its terminal is “the safest and most technologically advanced port in Ecuador” and cites close cooperation with law enforcement. But a European assessment described Posorja’s rapid expansion as “particularly attractive for criminal abuse,” warning that customs capacity could not keep pace with shipping volume.
The scanners that once symbolized vigilance now frame a sobering truth: ports are only as secure as the people operating them.
Gangs, Corruption, and the Human Factor
Technology has limits; traffickers exploit people. In Posorja, gangs like Los Choneros and Los Lobos wage a shadow war to control logistics. Families are threatened, fishermen coerced, and truckers intimidated. Former local police chief Mauricio Santamaría told OCCRP that gangs pressure residents into serving as stash-keepers or lookouts.
Retaliation against the state is fierce. In March, gunmen sprayed bullets into a local police base, wounding a lieutenant. Inside the terminal, canine units have become the most trusted line of defense—dogs can sniff drugs dissolved into textiles or stuffed into container seams that scanners miss. They also cannot be bribed.
But outside the fences, intimidation spreads. In one 2023 case, a trucker testified that armed men boarded his cab, ordered him to drive into the port, and warned that they knew his family. The load—1.1 tons of cocaine—was found only because a sniffer dog intervened. EU risk assessments now classify infiltration risk among port staff as “high,” prompting off-site busing of employees and regular “wealth checks.”
As one resident put it: “You don’t know who you’re talking to. There are radars everywhere, people feeding gangs information for a few dollars.”
EFE@Ernesto Guzmán Jr.
Collateral Damage in a Port Economy
Ecuador’s geography ensures temptation. Wedged between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest cocaine producers, and serving as the leading banana exporter globally, the country is tailor-made for smugglers: endless containers, perishable cargo, and high shipping volume. Europol’s drug unit has now labeled Ecuador “the number one gateway” for Latin American cocaine headed to Europe.
Posorja epitomizes that paradox. In just the first four months of 2025, authorities seized more than 10 tons of cocaine hidden in food shipments there. But seizures track only what is caught; the violence in town suggests much more passes undetected. In the five years before the port opened, Posorja saw 13 murders. Since 2020, there have been over 200, most linked to drugs.
For a community of just 33,000, the toll is devastating. Nearly half the town depends directly or indirectly on port jobs—from stevedores to fuel station clerks. The port’s security issues have not only led to increased violence but also to economic hardship. Shops shut earlier, families whisper about killings, and editorials mourn the lost tranquility of fishermen who once worried only about tides.
The government points to soaring seizures as proof of effort and blames higher cargo volumes for contamination risk. But residents see a different picture: a fortress port built with steel and scanners, breached by gangs who understood from the start that people, not machines, decide what leaves a harbor. In response, the government and port operators have implemented a series of measures, including increased police presence, enhanced surveillance, and improved training for port staff, to address the security issues.
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Ecuador built Posorja to ship prosperity. For now, it is exporting fear. Unless authorities and operators can scale integrity and protection at the human level as aggressively as they scaled cranes and quays, the country’s crown jewel risks becoming a cocaine superhighway with no off-ramp.