In the Ecuadorian city of Durán, an elite police unit led by Captain Jean Carlos Bustamante is fighting a losing battle against drug gangs, hampered not only by heavily armed and well-funded criminals but by corruption within the police, state and political system itself. The unit's efforts illustrate the wider crisis facing Ecuador, once a peaceful tourist destination that has become one of the world's most violent countries within less than a decade, largely as a result of its role as a key transit hub for cocaine bound for Europe and the US.

President Daniel Noboa has said around 70% of the cocaine reaching Europe and the US passes through Ecuador, smuggled onward by home-grown gangs with ties to Mexican cartels and Albanian mafia groups who exploit weak border controls and a long Pacific coastline. Last year more than 9,200 people were killed, one of the highest murder rates globally, despite a two-year hardline crackdown by Noboa that critics say has fragmented gangs rather than defeated them. Bustamante's team, raiding gang strongholds and using drones to catch street-level "micro-traffickers", says it operates in constant danger, having lost three colleagues, and can trust no one outside its own hand-picked ranks.