Psychosocial Profile of Country Conditions in Ecuador. Ecuador as Failed State.

The Republic of Ecuador is now or will soon be, a failed state. Public sectors of the Ecuadorian government have been intricately infiltrated and intentionally corrupted into collaboration with the growing organised criminal societies. This follows a pattern that our research has found in Somalia, Afghanistan, and other intractable violent civil conflicts. In every case, some part of the legal government and its socioeconomic elites seek to minimise their risk by playing on both sides of the competition.

The public-government sector, the organised criminal societies, and the indigenous peoples’ social structures, are in open contest for control of the state, using instruments of social, political, economic, and violence to advance their goals and protect their gains. The three contenders for the state are principally separated by force of arms in a contest that is not weighted in favour of the state. The diminishing state security apparatus is focused on protecting itself and the upper levels of the elite tier population segment that fund it. Figure 13 illustrates just a few of the ongoing assassinations of elected and appointed public figures in the war between the state and criminal societies challenging it over the past 18 – 24 months. In the city of San Vicente, a part of the Guayaquil metropolis, the newly elected mayor, former nurse and 26-year-old Brigitt Garcia, was assassinated a year into her first term in March 2024.

The previous July, In July, the mayor of another city within the Guayaquil metro, this time, the town of Manta, Mayor Agustin Intriago, who had just been re-elected was assassinated. In the town of Salinas, mayoral candidate Julio Cesar Farachio, was assassinated in the days prior to his election and in the town of Puerto Lopez mayoral candidate Omar Menendez, 41, was assassinated just before his election.

This past April 2024, Jose Sanchez, mayor of Camilo Ponce Enriquez, was assassinated after surviving the first two attempts on his life. In the city of Duran, also a part of the Guayaquil metropolis, the mayor is Luis Chonillo and as of yet, he has not been assassinated, although he has escaped several attempts. Since his election, he has only been able to enter the city’s municipal building twice, and on neither occasion was he able to reach his office: he was evacuated due to threats from people on motorcycles surrounding the premises.

On May 15, while the 220 other mayors of Ecuador were starting the first sessions of their municipal councils, Chonillo was fleeing a scene of an assassination attempt. The politician escaped unharmed, but two of his police security detail and a street vendor were killed in the attack.

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“All our officials have been threatened, they file complaints, but nothing gets done; they have not even been given security and many others have resigned,” - says Chonillo, from a place of hiding.

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This is Ecuador’s assassination game, where white criollo elites who refuse to collaborate with the cancerous criminal social organisations, are murdered while waiting for state protection that never arrives. Their disconnect is between what the national president says in public versus what the state government structure, long corrupted as a survival mechanism, plays a dangerous game attempting to maintain control with ever dwindling support of their population base in full flight into exile.

The violence in Ecuador is numbing. Each murder each day in each town and city adds to the violent noise that becomes part of the normal background. For the victims and their families, not so much. While the violence has finally come home to Ecuador’s criollo elite, it has been this way for more than a decade for those caught in the middle who are neither indigenous nor criollo elite. This is Ecuador’s ‘crying game’ as the people in the barrios call it. Each story is often the beginning of an escape into exile. A five-year-old boy doing his homework in his bedroom when bullets pierce his window and kill him.

90 rounds of machinegun fire rip through the premises of a pharmaceutical company hitting a baby in the head while she was in her mother’s arms. Parents looking for their son find him in a ditch near the school, his body mutilated by torture. A city council member trying to rally his neighbourhoods is kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. These are the stories of our research informants in Quito, Guayaquil and the towns in between. One story illustrates the dilemma within the middle population of Ecuador that is doing most of the dying and most of the fleeing into exile – the lower class of Ecuadorians who are distinctly mixed indigenous pueblecitos who are not accepted into European criollo society, and unfamiliar with how to transition to or be accepted by, the indigenous communities. This large segment of Ecuadorians exist in a poverty of insufficient individual and large group identity to sustain hope for a better future. In next report, delves more deeply into this community which has made up most of the refugee caravans claiming asylum in the United States, Canada, and Europe.