Psychosocial Profile of Country Conditions in Ecuador. Ecuador’s Clash of Civilisations.

Ecuador’s Clash of Civilisations. Ecuadorian citizens who flee into exile are, in the majority, from the mestizo or mixed blood segment of the population. This segment is approximately 50% of the country by census. The remainder of the population is divided between indigenous and Eurocentric. Maria Gabriela is an example a member of Ecuador’s Eurocentric elite who found herself and her husband fleeing into exile. She and her husband, both lawyers, rejected the automatic class patrimony of their race and culture and joined legal efforts to try and reform Ecuador’s malformed society from within. They were quickly targeted by criminal societies as their fellow Eurocentric inhabitants rescinded their security protection. She and her husband quickly learned how exposed they were as a “socially distinct,” “socially visible,” segment of Ecuador’s population, having “particularity” and that she and her husband belonged to a population segment that “constitutes a discrete class of persons…heirs in Ecuador… as viewed in my society.” This specific population segment that Maria Gabriela attempted to describe is the Eurocentric criollo (plus those who want to be criollo) that does not identify as or with indigenous and is a part of the post-colonial Ecuadorian elite that have historically ruled Ecuador as a colonial patrimony.

---

“Ecuadorians with the possibility to travel to the US, Ecuadorians with family members living abroad the country and Ecuadorians with family members running successful companies that are subject of threats later on. I cannot change this characteristic about me.” “My persecutors consider that those of us who are well off should pay for them. I think that they believe that we must pay for the opportunities that they did not receive and that we should amend the inequities that Ecuador has been through. They see us as guilty of having had greater possibilities than them and they want to punish us for that. They believe they have the right to extort money from us and take away everything we have, including our peace of mind.” - former Ecuadorian civil rights lawyer Maria Gabriela.

---

As members of Ecuador’s Euro-centric ‘elite’ society, they were identifiable by both phenotype and archetype. This section attempts to illustrate the characteristics and degree of Ecuador’s malformed society that drives ever increasing violence into an open civil war. As figure 4 depicts, the peoples of the highland regions of the Andean (Sierra) Mountain Range of South America are Amerindian, and specifically as shown in figure 3, they are members of the large Quechuas de las Andean. An attractive and handsome people, aspects of their phenotype include silky thick black hair, olive skin tones with little melanin deficiency and varying degrees of dorsal hump over the nasal bridge. The tip of the nose is broad and downward facing. Some members of the Amerindian ethnicity have used rhinoplasty surgery to ease the degree of the dorsal hump, most Quechuas that I have interviewed and engaged with find it to be a pleasing aesthetic in their culture. The criollo or near criollo members of Ecuadorian society, normatively feature classical southwest European features in facial topography, hair, and body type.

The point made here is that Ecuador’s population segments are well attuned to the distinctive criollo or near criollo phenotypes that mark them as distinctive. With this phenotype comes a set of stereotypes about Criollo’s likely socioeconomic and political status and views that are not accurate for all members. While Maria Gabriela and her family received a patrimony inheritance (the ‘heir’ part of her statement) from their late father, many such members of this population segment did not. The former president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, for example, did not. He was born into middle-class criollo (white European) family, but his parents had eleven children, and the family lived with financial hardships for their population segment. At age 15, Lasso worked to earn sufficient money to pay for his private high school and was unable to fully complete his university degree at the Pontifical Catholic University in Quito. His status within this ‘socially distinct’ population segment however, enabled him to enter the work force in the Guayaquil Stock Exchange, followed by increasingly well-paid

positions financial companies, the head of operations for Coco-Cola – Ecuador, chairman of the Guayas Transit Commission, the Development Bank of Latin America, and the Caribbean, and the CEO of Banco Guayaquil via his family and social connections that would never be available to indigenous peoples or population segments not visibly, recognizably Euro-centric elite. Figure 3 offers an imperfect comparison between the ‘socially distinct’ ‘particularity’ of Ecuador’s Eurocentric state versus its Quechua Pacha state, and against the backdrop of the mestizo Ecuadorians in the middle who belong to neither state’s inner society, economics, or politics. The new president, Daniel Noboa, is himself, the 35-year-old heir of a Banana plantation from one of Ecuador’s wealthy families in Guayaquil, the centre of narcotics exports to Europe.

Opaque Drivers of Social Chaos. In the next report, we will explore the dynamic between the various population segments and describes how and why Ecuador’s ‘socially distinct’ Eurocentric population group is under attack and disintegrating from within.

The example of Maria Gabriela above, illustrates the consequences of Ecuador’s elites’ choices to not become involved in the protective envelope of their Euro centric community (which often involves active or passive cooperation and collaboration with organised criminal exploitation). This choice, while noble, leaves them exposed to organised crime backed by the state, and or organised criminal societies that are in competition with the state, and or the growing majority indigenous movements that seek to overturn the Euro-centric Ecuadorian social order. They become a persecuted part of Ecuadorian society because of their rejection of the ongoing criminal exploitation and control of the Ecuadorian state by the collaborative cooperation of the remnants of the colonial state. The growth of criminal societies within the state and in competition with the state, will eventually eliminate neutrality within civil society, forcing individual and family to choose. The Runasimi indigenous communities are even now, organising for the coming struggle. Figure 4 is a graphic aid to use in understanding the complexity of Ecuador’s descent into chaos as a failing state. There are two principal ongoing conflicts in Ecuador that are interrelated. The first is between the post-colonial state and its majority non-European identifying (indigenous) population. The second is within the post-colonial criollo and mestizo populations that do identify as European and who are in competition for control of the state’s population and wealth. The left half of figure 4 illustrates the past three presidents of the Ecuadorian State, the leaders of two of the criminal society organisations that are contesting for control of Ecuador’s population and resources – the leader of Los Choneros, Adolfo Macias (call sign ‘Fito’), and the leader of the Los Lobos, Fabricio Colon Pico (call sign ‘Savage’). Also included on the left side of this graphic are three of the many senior public officials indicted for collaborating with ‘Fito’ and ‘Savage’ and leaders of the other 17 criminal societies.

The three identified are a former president, a former vice president, and a current supervisor of the national judicial appointment and accreditation system. None of the men on the left half are indigenous. All of them are criollo, or nearly so. Criollo is a Spanish term for European Caucasian whose family bloodlines are not contaminated with indigenous peoples. From the perspective of the indigenous peoples on the right side of figure 4, the more that the criollos or near-criollos fight each other, the likelier they will dissolve and become extinct, making way for the return of the indigenous social order which has not been in existence for the past 500 years. Returning to figure 4, there are several complex inter-relationships between the two conflicts. The indigenous awakening in Ecuador was triggered by the increase of natural resource exploitation of indigenous lands and watersheds and their increase in sociopolitical assistance by NGO organisations of member states of the OAS. The resultant resistance of the indigenous movements and their supporters to the state ongoing exploitation of natural resources was not well received in Quito. Public and private entities worked in collaboration with the state justice department and parliament to limit indigenous capacity to resist the merger of Ecuador’s society and economy into the globalised order of trade, travel, technology, communication, transportation, resource extraction, tourism, farming, animal husbandry, and so on. While Ecuador’s indigenous peoples are not opposed to all forms of globalisation, they believe in managed mergers based on their own indigenous world views, rather than those of the Euro centric elites. One of the most important inter- relationships between the indigenous communities of Ecuador and the ongoing descent into chaos of the non-indigenous community is around corruption. The elites and the state they control, have long been funded by access to indigenous lands and resources that were claimed through legal mechanisms like eminent domain, practices that came to a head during the indigenous seizure of the National Assembly in 2019 (see figure 5). As the indigenous populations began receiving legal and political support to interfere with or even halt the ongoing consumption of their natural resources, Ecuador’s state and elites resorted to extrajudicial use of violence and prosecution via an obliging criminal system to continue economic exploitation. Without commenting on the ethics of this, one of the net results was to establish acceptable lines of effort to obtain resources, power, and recognition. The criminal social organisations, formed for self-protection, belonging, and identity, quickly learned how to obtain what they needed when the state could not or would not provide. Instead of targeting the indigenous population’s resources as the

government and elites were doing, they went after the more liquid and desirable wealth of the state and its elites. Now, the Ecuadorian state is faced by sociopolitical and economic rebellion from the newly awakened Indigenous activist collectivists (external to the Euro-centric post-colonial states and elites), and an internal threat (criminal societies) of its own making. Returning to figure 4, we are unable to separate the growing indigenous sociopolitical-economic indigenous rebellion from the violent internal criminal insurgency that is destroying the structure of the state. The latter begat the former and both are, at this juncture, unstoppable until the Westphalian state dissolves or is remade into a form that most Ecuadorians can find ownership of and are willing to defend.

Where the state’s ability to secure its population and resources is weakening, the criminal societies capacity to inflict damage to the population and extract its resources is growing. This criminal capacity is expanding because of the sustained levels of traumatising violence that breaks families and mentally extremises young people after extended exposure to violent trauma. While the indigenous communities of Ecuador are not immune to this violent contest between the state and criminal societies, indigenous collectives have been mobilising and militarising their members to defend themselves against the state’s attempts to physically force them into political, social, and economic submission. The next most vulnerable are those persons and families of the elite tier population segment that are unwilling to collaborate and cooperate with the public-private corruption of the postcolonial Ecuadorian state. Where the legal state structure and its supporting elite are in open contest with the organised criminal societies for control of the state’s population and resources, the indigenous population have the most to gain by the complete collapse of the European Westphalian State of Ecuador and the flight of the remnants of post-colonial European oriented criollos and mestizos to countries more European in orientation.