As Crises Converge on Ecuador, an Exodus

Images of the exodus:

* Every day, hundreds of Ecuadoreans hoping to settle in Europe and the United States cross paths in Quito’s airport with glum countrymen who tried to sneak into Madrid, Miami and other major cities, posing as tourists, only to be sent back by airport immigration police.

* Last month, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter in the Pacific intercepted a decrepit smuggling boat carrying 186 illegal immigrants, the ninth vessel from Ecuador stopped by U.S. authorities since March 1999. The migrants were headed for the United States via Guatemala, where the bodies of 19 Ecuadoreans washed ashore in October, and Mexico, where Ecuadoreans left recently in an abandoned truck almost asphyxiated.

* As the demand for passports has quadrupled, provincial bureaucracies have run out of passport materials. The throng at the passport office in Quito brings together well-dressed families of the fading middle class with gnarled indigenous women in shawls and bowler hats. Barreling past sidewalk hustlers selling places in line, a young man named Carlos emerges from the exit turnstile holding his brand-new brown passport as if it were a holy object.

“I just want to leave,” says the 20-year-old from Azuay province, which has been emptied of working-age men. “This country is all screwed up. They say the border of the United States is well-guarded. Is that true?”

Converging crises here have unleashed an unprecedented wave of emigrants during the last two years. Ecuador suddenly has joined Cuba, Haiti and China on the list of countries sending ragtag smuggling flotillas to the United States.

Between 1 million and 3 million of the country’s citizenry of 12 million now live overseas, mostly in the United States, Spain and Italy--and a large number of them are there illegally. The New York area has a higher number of Ecuadoreans than all but two cities in their home country. An estimated 180,000 live in Southern California.

Ecuador has become a textbook example of the scenarios that worry diplomats and immigration officials in the United States and Europe. Beset by uncertainty, this once-tranquil South American country has turned into a red-alert origin point for accelerating illegal immigration.

“What was a constant steady stream has become a mass evacuation,” a U.S. Embassy official said.

Exodus Driven by a Number of Factors

The causes are obvious. The last three years have brought record inflation, banking collapses, 19% unemployment, and underemployment calculated at 60%. Political chaos has led to five presidents in five years and a brief uprising in January by army officers and indigenous groups, the continent’s first coup in two decades. Volcano eruptions and El Nino-related floods worsened the turmoil.

The resulting spike in emigration has benefited from well-established migratory and criminal networks. Since the 1980s, natives of Azuay and Canar provinces have migrated to the United States, bringing those rural areas million-dollar remittance flows every year and startling New England-style mansions.

Moreover, a strategic location and weak law enforcement have made Ecuador a base for international mafias that move Asian and Arab immigrants to the United States using an array of routes, methods and corrupt government accomplices. Until 1998, foreigners didn’t need visas to enter Ecuador. Immigrant smuggling is not a crime here; Ecuador’s Congress began considering an anti-smuggling law last month.

U.S. officials hope Ecuador will get tough with a booming immigrant-smuggling industry. Smuggling fees have jumped to $12,000 per migrant, according to a high-ranking Ecuadorean law enforcement official. That is far more than the rate for Mexican border-crossers, who usually pay smugglers between $500 and $1,000, and two or three times more than for Central Americans.

“The smugglers are the biggest millionaires in Azuay,” said Alexis Ponce, a human rights activist. “The emigrants turn over entire farms to them to pay for the trip.”

The volume and sophistication of seagoing smuggling here rival Chinese and Caribbean operations. U.S. officials estimate that 1,500 to 2,000 Ecuadoreans a month go north in boats that often carry 150 to 200 passengers each.

The interception last month of the Elizabeth I was a classic case. The U.S. Coast Guard stopped the former fishing boat in international waters 380 miles off the Ecuadorean coast. The bedraggled, seasick passengers included 44 women and eight children, according to the Foreign Ministry here.

Given the shoddy condition of the Elizabeth I, the interception may have been as much a rescue as a capture.

“It was on the verge of foundering,” a U.S. military official said. “We have never found a coyote boat with more than three life vests for the crew. You just don’t know how many people are dying out there.”

Because of the Ecuadorean navy’s woeful lack of resources, policing falls mainly to U.S. Coast Guard and Navy vessels on anti-drug patrols in the region. Their primary targets are maritime drug runners, giving them the power to stop suspicious vessels, which they turn over to the Ecuadorean navy.

Authorities here routinely release smugglers and migrants and return captured boats to the owners, although the new anti-smuggling law, if passed, may bring a crackdown. Some boats have been intercepted more than once, according to U.S. officials.

Like the Elizabeth I, the smugglers’ destination generally is Guatemala. Accomplices then transport immigrants to the U.S.-Mexico border. In the last three years, fast-rising arrests of Ecuadoreans by the U.S. Border Patrol have outpaced detentions of other South Americans.

Ecuadoreans also stow away on commercial ships, apply for visas with high-quality fake documents and try to slip past authorities in the Miami and Houston airports after arriving as transit passengers with tickets for Europe.

But the numbers remain a drop in the bucket compared with arrests of Mexicans and Central Americans. Emigrants leaving the country have a much more dramatic impact on their homeland than their arrival does on the United States.

Number of Women Leaving on the Rise

Men once dominated the exodus, but the number of urban female immigrants has shot up because of the allure of domestic jobs in southern Europe.

“I was willing to leave my 11-year-old daughter with her grandmother and seek my fortune,” said Jacqueline Romero of coastal Guayaquil, who was sent home by French authorities in April with a planeload of fellow Ecuadoreans. “That’s what happens when you don’t have any support at home, when your country is full of misery.”

After losing a low-paying job at a pharmacy, Romero, 36, set out for Barcelona. Spain has become a hot destination, drawing 200 Ecuadoreans a day, according to the high-ranking Ecuadorean law enforcement official. Ecuadorean tourists don’t need a visa to enter Spain, which offers a familiar language and culture, plus salaries that are five to eight times higher than in Ecuador.

Families are being pulled apart.

Gerardo’s family is an example. (He asked that his full name be withheld because he works in law enforcement in Quito.) He is from Loja province in the south. His uncle migrated to New Jersey four years ago, surviving a trek across the Arizona desert, and now makes a living as a busboy and part-time wedding photographer.

A year ago, two female cousins went to Madrid, found work as maids and hairdressers and gained legal status. The cousins sent word that their home was open to relatives wanting to follow their lead. Three months ago, Gerardo’s younger brother, Federico, accepted the invitation--even though he is an agronomist, the family’s first university graduate.

“A full-fledged engineer, but he was only making $90 a month,” Gerardo said. “He sold everything he had and borrowed money on top of that. I tried to talk him out of it. I showed him all the articles in the press about Ecuadoreans being mistreated, exploited, humiliated over there. But he kept saying, ‘I’m willing to humiliate myself.’ ”

Federico, 24, needed money for more than the $1,500 plane ticket. Ecuadoreans pay sleazy middlemen who help them pose as veteran tourists on a European jaunt. The fixers provide fake visas and entry stamps for passports, high-interest cash loans, even fashionable clothes to help peasants look upscale.

Federico left a month ago for Madrid via Colombia, Venezuela and Paris. Like Romero, he only made it as far as the stern French authorities, who detained 50 Ecuadoreans at the airport in Paris and unceremoniously sent them home. The crestfallen Federico promptly went even deeper into debt. A week ago, he made the trip again via Amsterdam, this time reaching Madrid.

“He called to say everything is fine,” Gerardo said. “He’s making $800 a month working in a restaurant. His goal is to be an engineer in London.”

The exodus will continue because of the profound economic crisis, according to Adrian Bonilla, deputy director of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences here. “We are in for a depression of at least three more years,” Bonilla said.

Despite the “humanitarian tragedy,” Bonilla sees positive aspects. A returning flow of money and emigrants has shaken up the rigid elites who are partly responsible for Ecuador’s multiple woes, especially in the provinces, he said. Restless expatriates bring back modern political and social attitudes as well as Budweiser beer and “techno” music.

“It’s not just that they generate money,” Bonilla said, “they democratize and open up local societies.”

Deputy Foreign Minister Francisco Carrion puts the issue in historical perspective, noting that Spain, for example, once exported immigrants to Latin America.

“Many nations have gone through this kind of experience,” Carrion said. “Other nations should keep this in mind and take a wider view. . . . But the solution is here. We must work to overcome our crisis. And we must convince our people to stay home.”