The battle for Comite del Pueblo. Ecuador as Failed State.

This story is set in the Comite del Pueblo neighbourhood to the north of Ecuador’s capital, Quito. One of the emerging criminal gangs ran afoul of the residents of the barrio that it was based out of. The conflict began in the early evening, when several of the gang members became bored and assaulted a girl who lived in the neighbourhood. Several residents ran to the girls aid and chased her persecutors away. When the gang members returned with guns and additional members, the residents refused to back down, using rocks and Molotov cocktails against automatic weapons.

---

“We ran and took cover while they shouted and threatened us, but then we decided to stand up to them and went out with sticks to see them off,” according to one resident.

They turned out as a sort of neighbourhood militia and their barrio turned into a war zone on Sunday, June 18, 2024. Removing cobblestones from the sidewalks, they smashed them into small pieces to be used as weapons. Other community members sounded the alarm in the small streets and apartment buildings, calling neighbours to leave their homes and join in the fray.

---

“We all plucked up the courage,” says one resident. The violence culminated in setting fire to the home of the gang’s female leader, known as La Pastora (the Shepherdess) who has been arrested 13 times between 2002 and 2021. Her house was considered the headquarters for all drug trafficking activities in their barrio. When it went up in flames the police finally arrived, killing one of the alleged criminals and injuring another person. The police and residents battled the gang members until early Monday morning the next day and the gang members temporarily retreated.

After the police left the scene, the criminals returned on motorbikes, firing shots into the air and making further threats. “They are going to set off bombs under people’s homes and they said that war had been declared,” says another resident. The female gang leader was not arrested, and instead, claimed that her neighbours burned her house down for no reason, burning any evidence that the police may have been able to use to arrest her. The day after the confrontation, the gang carried out its threats against a handful of businesses.

---

“We can’t live like this,” says one resident. “We can’t even go out. We are terrified.” The purpose of this anecdotal story is to illustrate the phenomenological reality of the mixed blood population caught between Ecuador’s indigenous world and its European world. Their children populate the low rank fighter populations of the state’s police and military security services for pay and their commanding officers are white criollos from the post colonial elite. But their children also populate the ranks of the criminal societies such as Los Lobos and Los Chonilos.

The men and women in figure 15 are the parents of the fighters on both sides of Ecuador’s civil war. This is the issue that so often escapes western diplomats who employ political science and criminal justice lenses to articulate solutions that never work. The criminal social organisations are a symptom, not the cause of the social disintegration of the Ecuadorian state. Figure 17 attempts to place Ecuador’s dilemma into a caricature of context that compares those being recruited serve in the front lines of the internal war in Ecuador. The state recruits young men and some women to serve as the protectors of its institutions; cultural, social, economic, political, securitisation, and infrastructure. These institutions, mostly benefiting the Eurocentric elite of criollos and mestizos, are essentially ignored and or resisted by the indigenous populations who already self-identify as indigenous. The criminal societies, on the other hand, also recruit young men and women to do just the opposite; sieze and convert these institutions as competitive prizes of wealth, power, recognition, and authority, to be fought over internally with each other and externally with the state which claims ownership. The young men and women who are formally (by the state) and informally (by the criminal socieites) recruited by each side, end up fighting each other. The point that is lost on western observers, however, is that these young men and women are from the same families. The state’s upperclass elites do join the police, military, and other infrastructure servcies, but they are the officers. The commanders and administrative staff that make policy, decide and enforce their own behavioural codes and operate their respective institutions at the behest not of the criminal socieites or the indigenous societies, but of the Eurocentric elite.

Valka-Mir Foundation researches the psychosocial construction of these criminal societies internal language, which is often only published on their bodies as tatoos or grafitti within their secure domains. In the images in Figure 17, you can see that concepts such as Dios/God, Elegance, Hope, Fortitude, Honor, Fidelity, and Courage are splashed all over themselves and their environment, almost like a recruiting ad for the US Marines. But they are not state soldiers, they are the soldiers for the criminal societies that challenge the existance of the state as a vehicle for a specific, bounded, particular segment of Ecuadorian society. One that is “socially distinct,”

“socially visible,” as having “particularity” and that “constitutes a discrete class of persons…heirs [or slaves] in Ecuador….”

This concept is the essence of why Ecuador’s society will continue to devolve and spiral into ever increasing amounts of violence. The young men and women that the state finds available to protect its remaining vestiges of power and control, are more than counterbalanced by the criminal societies’ ability to break, recruit, weaponize, and employ even more members from the same barrios and the same families. Where the state is required to spend large amounts of resources to recruit, train, equip, and care for their soldiers, the criminal societies have a much easier task as their societies are widely decentralised and operate as replacements for families that have been destroyed or damaged by the ongoing conflict between the state and its criminal society challengers. The more the state acts/reacts with kinetic force and coercion, the greater the damage to the networks of families and societies and the greater the ease in recruiting already damaged young soldiers who have far less inclination to use direct violence than their government peers. Ultimately, however, the structural dynamics of Ecuadorian society have already accomplished the task of ensuring the state’s continuing need to continue this violent war against itself until either the elite who support the existing state flee into exile, or enough of the population segments caught between indigenous and elite, either flee into exile or are otherwise killed. Now, this population segment is doing both: dying and fleeing into exile in endless caravans headed northward.