So far in 2013, narcotics police have carried out 940 street-level raids on small-scale drug sellers around Ecuador. More than 1,200 people were arrested: 916 men, 196 women and 124 minors.

The rising number of minors arrested in these buy-and-busts confirms a worrisome trend law enforcement officers have noticed: more and more children are being involved in the local drug trade. Many of them are recruited by their own parents.

An 11-year-old with light skin and black hair makes her way quickly down a street in the historic downtown of Quito. She’s a member of a network of small-scale drug dealers.

Along with her siblings and parents, she’s a member of one of the gangs dedicated to street sales in the capital city’s markets and plazas. When she spots a police car, she can disappear in seconds, because she has the streets and nearby hiding places memorized.

Her story is not so different from that of a seven-year-old who ran into some police in southern Guayaquil in early April. The girl was scared. She dropped several $1 baggies of cocaine on the ground and tried to run home. Police arrested the adults who had tried to use her to make the delivery.

Traffickers who bring the drugs in over the border from Perú or Colombia hand the shipments off to the large scale operators in Ecuador. The presence of drugs in Ecuador has grown because the distributors who move their product through the country to the ports for transport to the U.S. don’t pay their collaborators in money anymore: they pay them in drugs.

A marijuana package can cost ten dollars. It can be split down into 60 single dose packages which sell for $1 each. The doses which get delivered to the distributors who are in charge of street sales.

Police think that 150 dealers works in Quito’s historic downtown. At a single corner, near the Julio César coliseum, police know of 30 drug dealers. They have also found drugs hidden among the fruits and vegetables at open air markets, where women and children sell the drugs to customers.

Fernando Carrión, a security expert, estimates that narcotics consumption has gone up in Ecuador in the past four years since Ecuador has become a key trafficking point for drugs headed to the U.S.A.

“The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 270 tonnes of drugs (mostly cocaine, heroin and marijuana) comes through Ecuador on their way to the States. This affects local habits.”

Carrión says the large trafficking organizations like to work with families because it lowers the risk of information leaks. The organizations also hire local gangs to take care of the trade in the different neighbourhoods that they identify as new markets.