Psychosocial Profile of Country Conditions in Ecuador. Civil War in the Republic of Ecuador. 2023-2026

Ecuador began 2026 with a record homicide rate of 51 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, surpassing the previous peak of 46 in 2023 and representing a dramatic rise from just 5.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017. Since his election in late 2023, President Daniel Noboa has responded with a policy of militarization, but this has only deepened the human rights crisis and triggered widespread reports of human rights violations. Since November 2025, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has issued two precautionary measures concerning Ecuador: one addressing the military’s alleged forced disappearance of 26 individuals and another related to a growing health crisis within the country’s prison system. 2025 has been the most violent year in the history of Ecuador, according to its own Ministry of the Interior, averaging 25 homicides a day, or one murder every hour of every day.

23-year-old Landy Parraga Goyburo

According to a recent report by the UN Sustainable Development Group:

”Driven by drug trafficking and organized crime, Ecuador, a formerly peaceful country, has been transformed into the most violent in Latin America. Crime affects all sectors of society. Businesses are being robbed or extorted to pay for vaccines in exchange for protection, hospitals have been attacked and children are dropping out of school because they are no longer considered safe spaces.”

The report goes on to add that young people are especially at risk, particularly children, who are recruited by gangs to act as informants or ’bells,’ to sell drugs, collect extortion money, or even committing violent crimes. Moreover, young girls are also at risk of becoming sex slaves of these groups. Further, a recent report sponsored by the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement unit at the US Department of State indicates that the homicide rate has significantly increased nationwide in Ecuador, with young people between 10 and 30 years of age being disproportionately affected by this trend. The city of Guayaquil is portrayed as particularly dangerous for people between the ages of 10 and 19. Accordingly, the UN has recently opened a new branch of the Office on Drugs.

In May 2023, former Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso dissolved the national parliament as it was preparing to impeach him from office. The following June, Lasso announced his withdrawal from the election, scheduled for August 20th, 2023. On 13 June 2023, political candidate Luisa González was en-route to register her presidential candidacy with the National Electoral Council with her supporters and president of the Citizen Revolution movement, Marcela Aguiñaga, when they were attacked with pepper spray and tear gas by the National Police. She was treated at a Quito medical centre after flushing her eyes from the pepper spray. The National Police claimed to have used chemical agents to protect security and public order because of the hostile behaviour of González's supporters. On 9 August 2023, candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated after a campaign rally in Quito at the age of 59. He is the first presidential candidate to have been assassinated in the country since Abdon Calderon Muñoz's assassination in 1978. The six Colombian men accused of murdering the Ecuadorean presidential candidate were found dead in a prison in the port city of Guayaquil on October 9th following their arrest, Ecuador's prison authority said in a statement. The newly elected president of Ecuador is Danial Noboa, and he is finishing the remainder of the 18 months term of office vacated by former president Guillermo Lasso who stepped down before he could be impeached. Former President Lasso was a centre-right businessman/banker whose CREO21 party’s ideology is liberal conservatism or classical liberalism, depending on who is speaking. President Lasso was elected with the highest vote percentage, ~22%, amidst extreme levels of violence, dissent, protest, and repression. The next election is in August 2025. In early 2024, the new president has already publicly declared that an internal armed conflict was underway in Ecuador. In 2022, Ecuador was the tenth most violent country in Latin America and the Caribbean, after an astonishing 82% rise in murders compared to the previous year. In 2023, Ecuador became the fourth most violent country, behind Honduras, Venezuela, and Colombia. In 2024, Ecuador may become the deadliest country in the Americas. Ecuador’s elected and appointed public officials such as mayors, prosecutors, members of parliament, defense attorneys, and presidential candidates are murdered with regularity in Ecuador. Television stations are taken over by armed gunmen during live broadcasts. Professional assassination squads operate with impunity, killing targeted patients in hospitals and national beauty queens in restaurants. Ecuador has 36 prisons. 25% of them are under the control of the organised criminal gangs which use them as their operational headquarters and recruitment centres. The financial flows from narcotics trafficking from Ecuador to Europe and North America has surpassed the legal gross domestic product of Ecuador and criminal organisations now vie for control of the population against the nominally legal portions of the state. The distinction between the legal portions of the state and the rapidly growing national and international criminal organisations is diminishing as public servants at all levels of municipal, state, and national governments opt for physical survival through cooperation and collaboration with organised criminal societies.

This past January 2024, after the new president tried to transfer the top leaders of the notorious Los Choneros, they were freed by unknown public-private support teams that have been constructed within and without of the government over the past decade at least. The nation’s military has been ordered into the streets to “neutralise” the violent criminal organisations within Ecuador after over 75% of Ecuador’s population expressed no confidence in the ability of the local or national police services to protect them with equally high percentages indicating that those police services were fully corrupted. All the above is occurring against the backdrop of an even deeper conflict between the part of Ecuadorian people/families who identify as European in psychosocial-economic origination against Indigenous origination, a distinction that divides Ecuador’s population both overtly and covertly. The social discontinuity between Ecuador’s Indigenous and European parts, allows for the growth of criminal social organisations to flourish more like cancer than hierarchical and parasitic organised crime found in Europe or North America. The criminal societies in Ecuador and the Northern Triangle of Central America, are cancerous in that they will eventually kill the host because of the profound psychosocial motivations that drive their growth. The principal population segment that has been fleeing into exile from Ecuador and the Northern Triangle States are the European oriented mestizo families that do not identify as indigenous Runasimi (Andes Mountain Range) nor as Quechuan of the Northern Triangle. These mestizo persons and families lack the financial capacity to pay for public and private protection that keep the upper quadrant of the capital cities secure from public (corrupt state) and private (criminal societies) predators.

Now, the Euro mestizo persons/families fleeing into exile are being joined by members of the upper-class societies who have refused tocooperate/collaborate with either the corrupted state or the criminal societies and have become targeted for discipline, liquidation, or fleecing of licit or illicit wealth. The claimants in this case, clearly belong to the upper quadrant of Ecuadorian society. They are not indigenous in their phenotype nor in archetype. By their own admission, they are products of the Ecuadorian post-colonial population segment and operate within a Euro-centric psychosocial identity of egocentric individual agency. Their targeting by organised criminal societies linked to government agencies suggests that, despite their patrimonial inheritance from father and brother, they were and are, unprotected from the dwindling state protective apparatus that cooperates and collaborates with the oppositional growing criminal social organisations.