“Ecuador was not a big player like Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia,” Thayer recalled. “Ecuador’s role was as a transit route for coca paste moving from Peru into Colombia, for precursor chemicals used to process base into cocaine, and for drugs trafficked into the U.S. and elsewhere.”

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“Piles of rubble, abandoned wrecked cars, and syringes were scattered everywhere…The Attorney General went pale.”

Yvonne Thayer

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As the NAS Director in Ecuador, Thayer had to win the confidence of Ecuador’s Attorney General, Medina de López, who had authority over drug prosecutions and would be instrumental in authorizing any serious anti-narcotics operations. She invited him on a U.S. government-sponsored international visitor program, accompanying him as his guide and interpreter. Thayer told program coordinators that she wanted López to visit a treatment center to see how drugs were ravaging American society and understand the need to stem drug flows into the country. 

After meeting with counternarcotics officials and visiting inspectors at ports and airports, Thayer got word from trip planners that the Catholic Diocese drug treatment center in the Bronx had agreed to give them a tour. The Foreign Service Officer and the impeccably dressed Attorney General emerged from the subway into what Thayer remembered as “a war zone.”

“The streets were mostly vacant,” Thayer recalled, “with boarded up tenements covered in graffiti, cracked sidewalks, chain link fences topped with concertina wire. Piles of rubble, abandoned wrecked cars, and syringes were scattered everywhere…The Attorney General went pale.”

The treatment center director showed them around, highlighting the clinic where addicts slumped over metal folding chairs and the medical staff stared at the neatly-dressed Ecuadorian official with astonishment. López was silent for some time after the tour, then finally turned to Thayer and said, “I get it.”