It is not unusual for Diana Salazar, Ecuador’s attorney-general, to be followed by unfriendly compatriots. Her security retinue—a squad of soldiers armed to the teeth and encased in Kevlar—recently spotted a motorbike tailing her car. Its driver was the sister of a drug lord whom Ms Salazar is investigating. She discusses the incident as you might speak of missing the bus. Such irritations are now routine.
Drug gangs have overwhelmed Ecuador over the past five years, turning it from a peaceful oasis into mainland Latin America’s most violent country. Ms Salazar is a target because she is investigating links between Ecuador’s politicians, its judges and the transnational crime groups that have caused that change. On April 13th Ecuadorians will choose a new president in a run-off vote between the country’s current leader, Daniel Noboa, and Luisa González, a leftist lawyer whose mentor is Rafael Correa, a powerful former president. They will also, in effect, be choosing whether Ms Salazar’s investigations continue. Her six-year term ends on April 8th. Mr Correa and his allies hate her, and want to shut her up.
She lays out the scenario. In 2022 a drug financier, Leandro Norero, was killed in prison. Prosecutors seized his mobile phones and found much more than they bargained for. Thousands of encrypted messages showed that he had paid the police to tamper with evidence, and judges to release drug-traffickers from jail. The messages also suggested that his confidants had paid a judge $250,000 to free Jorge Glas, Mr Correa’s former vice-president, who had been jailed for corruption. The messages said the confidants hoped the “little favour” would be repaid if Mr Glas became president. Mr Norero’s cellmate has said that Mr Norero called Mr Correa from prison, and that they discussed Mr Glas’s release. Mr Correa denies this.
Mr Norero’s phone offered the “first glimpse of what was happening in society”, says Ms Salazar. Eyefuls would follow. Since December 2023 she and her team have pressed charges against 76 people, including former legislators, judges, policemen and officials from high up in the prison system; 44 have been sentenced to jail. Two dozen were given reduced sentences after admitting their guilt and ratting on their fellows. Trials are continuing.
Mr Correa has not been helpful. He has published posts on X warning of raids hours before Ms Salazar’s team carried them out. Several correístas were implicated in the investigations. Some fled the country. One former lawmaker, Ronny Aleaga, is thought to be living in Venezuela. Mr Glas was hiding in the Mexican embassy in Quito until police raided it last April and arrested him (the violation of the embassy was widely condemned).
Last year Mr Correa told The Economist Ms Salazar was “a puppet” of unnamed businessmen and said her investigations were politically motivated. She was the attorney-general in 2020 when Mr Correa was sentenced to eight years in prison for corruption. He says he is being persecuted; he now lives in Belgium, which granted him political asylum in 2022. Interpol has refused to issue a red notice for his arrest.
Mr Correa said he had never met Ms Salazar in person, called her “corrupt” and said right-wing politicians had “put her there” to “protect each other and go after us”. He noted that the murder rate was among the lowest in the region when he was in office and that his successors cut prison budgets and weakened the justice ministry. He listed reasonable initiatives to fight crime, including increasing the number of scanners in ports, co-operating with international actors and strengthening intelligence capabilities.
His portrayal of his time in office is incomplete. Mr Correa closed a military base run by the United States on Ecuador’s coast which used to monitor drug shipments. Former leaders of the FARC, a Colombian guerrilla group that ran cocaine through Ecuador until it disbanded in 2017, have said they gave money to Mr Correa’s first presidential campaign. Mr Correa did not respond to a request for comment before publication. Instead, on February 26th, he said on X that an article would appear in The Economist the following day.
Correístas in Congress have twice tried to impeach Ms Salazar. When a vote was postponed because she revealed that she was in the middle of a high-risk pregnancy, they suggested she was lying; Ms González called the pregnancy “a show” because Ms Salazar kept working throughout and “wore high heels”. (Ms Salazar recently gave birth to a daughter; both impeachment motions failed.) The correístas call her “the 10/20 prosecutor”, a reference to her marks in one part of the national exam for the profession. They omit that she got the highest overall marks in the country. She wonders if such attacks have anything to do with her being a black woman, rare in Ecuador’s halls of power.
She rebuts charges of bias, pointing out that she has also gone after senior officials from the administration of Guillermo Lasso, a right-wing former president, as well as his brother-in-law, for alleged corruption and links to gangs. Another investigation is looking into whether Lenin Moreno, Mr Correa’s successor, accepted kickbacks. She has a record of taking on the powerful of all stripes. In 2016 she helped send the football federation’s head to jail as part of an investigation into corruption at FIFA.
But accusations of favouritism still swirl. Last year two left-wing media outlets, Intercept Brazil and Drop Site News, published screenshots which purportedly show text-message conversations between Ms Salazar and Mr Aleaga. The messages appear to show her admitting to delaying investigations in order to favour right-wing candidates in the 2023 presidential election. Ms Salazar says the messages are “false” and part of a “smear campaign”.
Corruption “does not have a white, yellow, green or red flag”, she says, referring to the colours of Ecuador’s political parties. If officials who have been involved in corruption are linked to a political group, “that is not the fault of the prosecutor, but of the officials committing the crimes,” she says. “We have no choice but to carry out the investigations. And whoever has to go down, should go down.”
Plain talk like this has won Ms Salazar respect in Ecuador. “She is a national treasure, almost more important than whoever is in power,” says a businessman in Quito. But she bats away the idea of running for political office: “The judiciary should not be in politics. And politicians should keep their hands out of judicial matters.”
Her team is still sifting through evidence. She says there is time to stop narcos irreversibly embedding themselves in Ecuador. “We are not like Mexico and we are not going to get there,” she adds, warning that cartels in that country operate like “a para-state”. Her investigations, and the purge they have led to are about leaving a message that “impunity cannot last forever.” Her successor will have the power to uphold that principle, or bury it. ■
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