Rodrigo Velez, executive director of CONSEP, Ecuador’s DEA, and a member of the CSUN class of ’87 (Business Administration). Photo courtesy of Velez.

Ecuador is one of the gateways to South America. Its northern placement on the continent bordering Colombia and Peru make the picturesque country one of the first places travelers land on their way in or out of the continent. Unfortunately, although it has no major drug manufacturing within its borders, this placement between two of the world’s largest exporters of illicit drugs has made it a hotspot for trafficking and sales. That doesn’t sit well with Rodrigo Velez, executive director of CONSEP, Ecuador’s version of the Drug Enforcement Agency, and a member of the California State University, Northridge class of ’87 (Business Administration).

A native son of Ecuador, Velez came to the U.S. in 1980 and studied business at CSUN. After he graduated, his next stop was Security Pacific Bank (which was bought by Bank of America in 1992), where he was hired to be an analyst in the Remittance Banking Department. He never forgot that CSUN gave him the tools to succeed, even if those tools impacted areas other than business.

“Some of my favorite memories about CSUN are my discussions with a particular political science professor, since he lived in Ecuador because of his job at the U.S. embassy,” Velez remembered. “We had so much in common, and his knowledge and expertise in the field were wide.

“For me, all of the classes I attended were remarkable because I had the chance to learn from well-prepared professors,” he said.

Those professors instilled the knowledge he needed to break new ground in South America. After his stint at Security Pacific, the Matador went into the garment manufacturing business (or “maquillas”), first in Mexico, then back in Ecuador, where he built the country’s first maquilla.

Throughout this journey, he noted that his education at CSUN was the main guide in his professional development — a solid base to construct, as he puts it, his “self-learning and development.” After a short foray into another field, a commodities trading company for the Andean market, Velez entered public service.

Rodrigo Velez speaks to the United Nations-UNODC council in Vienna about intervention. Photo courtesy of Velez.

“Once this project was finished,” Velez said, “I stayed and started various analyses and re-engineering processes inside [CONSEP] with the objective of implementing most of the projects that were already designed. Our goal was to define a clear objective approach to the social phenomenon. This was to intervene and work directly with society.”

That’s what sold him on the project. CONSEP’s main goal wasn’t the eradication of drugs — although that’s part of it — but treating the populace afflicted with addiction, the more humane aspect of the war on drugs.

“[CONSEP] is a government institution that aims its actions, programs, projects and efforts to the well living — or buen vivir — of Ecuadorian society in the context of the social phenomenon of drugs,” he said. “The work of CONSEP is focused on the human being and the interaction or relationship with one’s environment, including a full compliance with human rights and health.”

Even with this holistic approach to fighting the drug problem in Equador, Velez still finds the business acumen he learned at CSUN an invaluable tool when figuring out how to best push these practices to a sometimes-reticent market.

“[So] how do we relate this to my professional training?” he asks. “We could establish that the services we as an institution have the duty to implement for our society, are equal to the products that a company offers to their target. This means that we need quality and excellence in every single process we develop.”

At the end of the day, Velez knows what he is up against. However, he knows that his employer and partner — the country of Ecuador — has his back because they’re both after the same thing, the health of its people.

“Ecuador… supported a global change about drug policy [that considered] that the objective of a public policy should be the humans and the respect and guarantee of their rights,” he noted, stopping to add, “There has been a phrase that has been traveling around the world: All you need is Ecuador.”

Luckily for Ecuador, they found what they needed in Rodrigo Velez.

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