Population and Resource Control in Ecuador. Indigenous versus State control over Population and Resources.

Ecuadorians who flee into exile describe to us ever-present fears of being kidnapped, injured, and killed by violent collectives who seek to take from them capital that they may or may not have. Those without liquid financial resources are targeted as expendable labour, usually in the service of violence, by both government and criminal societies. Those who have financial capital, are targeted for extraction if they are not under increasingly expensive physical protection by armed organisations. But even then, they tell us that they are aware that if they offer up this capital, they fear that their persecutors may not accept that they have obtained all of it until they have been tortured, killed, or both.

The violence in Ecuador is targeted towards who you are, what you may have in value, and how well protected you are. Some Ecuadorians from the elite portion of Ecuadorian society that controls most of the nation’s wealth also flee into exile. Many are educated as journalists, lawyers, or business owners who are family heirs and who would be presumed to have access to that wealth, if not ownership of it. The criminal societies and their fellow state supporting elites have interest in determining what they have and extracting it from them because they are unprotected.

In Ecuador, each person must know two things if they are to survive:

First, if they have anything of value to be stolen, abducted, used, traded, or sold without mercy, compassion, or compunction.

Second, are they appropriately protected for the level of value that they may have or be to someone or group interested in them. If you can’t answer both questions, then you should not be living in Ecuador.

Most of Ecuador’s exiled community were not able to satisfactorily answer these questions. It is perhaps, easier to understand that Ecuador’s society has become divided into armed camps: Indigenous, Criminal Societies, and the Ecuadorian State and its elites who operate and fund it. Illustrating this aspect of life in Ecuador will provide insight into the risks and dangers that are driving so much of this population into exile.

Indigenous versus State control over Population and Resources.

The state’s security resources are supposed to be provided equally to all parts of society, but as we illustrated, the state cannot even protect its own elected and appointed officials. Its judges and mayors are assassinated and terrorised constantly. Its police and military leaders are kidnapped and held for ransom. The most protected portion of the Ecuadorian state is the senior leadership of the security services and the office of the president, followed by the portion of Ecuadorian elite whose business, financial, and infrastructure ownership financially pay for the state’s survival. When we visit Quito, organised battalions of Ecuadorian military police augmented by full combat equipped infantry are assigned to key neighbourhoods where these families live and work. Once inside these well-guarded compounds, you feel quite safe from the chaos without. In the graphic figures above, we attempt to illustrate the ongoing three-way conflict between the indigenous peoples and the civil war between the peoples in the Eurocentric state.

That conflict has been simmering since 2019 when the Indigenous communities of the Amazon Basin and Andes highlands latterly took over the national capital and its parliament, demonstrating to both the criminal society state and the Eurocentric actual state, the power potential that this community possessed if they were pushed too far. Much of what the indigenous communities of the Andes and Amazon basin are trying to preserve are not of immediate value in that those resources need to be extracted, processed, transported, packaged, and shipped, just like cocaine, but far less profitable. Also, most of the tactics and strategies behind extortion operated by the criminal societies, do not work well in the highly decentralised and sociocentric communities of the indigenous peoples. This is why, after concessions by the state were made to the indigenous communities in 2019 and 2020, the overt confrontation between the two diminished to the backburner of the stove. Those indigenous aspirations and societal goals are still there, but the elevation of extreme violence between the Eurocentric state and the criminal state of Ecuador, need to playout before those communities will be able to assess the damage to their Ecuadorian homelands. The state has been forced to withdraw from open and untethered exploitation of resources they consider to be national, but which the indigenous communities consider to be their historical patrimony. The state’s capacity for population and resource control (PRC) has now narrowed to its needs of survival. Everyone within the protected sphere of leading, managing, and resourcing the state belong in this diminishing protected space. The space is diminishing because the available security capacity is shrinking. The space is shrinking because its competitor, the criminal societies, is growing stronger with more soldiers extracting more wealth from its own protected population and from the population caught in the middle. The space is shrinking also because elite state members on the inner protected space, are playing on both sides. Businesses routinely pay off the criminal societies rather than spend the time, effort, and money to build resilient systems of security.

The maintenance, management, compensation, etc, make for profit & loss decision that end up favouring the criminal societies’ offers of ‘vaccuna’ or vaccination-against-crime. Ecuador’s commercial interests conduct their long-term financial planning and find that the likelihood of Ecuador’s survival mitigates against their long-range investments that are likely to be taken over by either the criminal societies or the indigenous communities if the Ecuadorian Euro-state fails.