Ecuador: The Gateway

With the crisis in the Mediterranean showing no sign of letting up and 2016 the deadliest year for crossings on record, a number of economic migrants and asylum seekers are looking for new escape routes from misery. Instead of paying thousands of dollars to be smuggled to Europe on a unseaworthy dinghy, they fly to Latin America. Some then embark on a perilous path north through the Colombian jungle and crime-ravaged Central America, bound for the United States and Canada.

In 2008, Ecuador passed a new constitution which created an “open door” policy for all foreign visitors. From one day to the next, no-one needed a visa to enter, turning Ecuador from a little known dot on the South American map to a key destination for people who wanted to travel to or through the Americas.

Although visa requirements were soon reinstated for some countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia) Ecuador maintains some the world’s most liberal visa standards.

Giovanna Tipán Barrera, the director of the human mobility department of the Pichincha region which incorporates Quito, said so many “extra-continental” migrants have arrived in recent years that they are now running Spanish classes for Arabic speakers and other communities.

Her department has worked with migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, Congo, Ghana, and Iran, and while some arrive with nothing, others are “middle, middle upper class. They have the resources to pay for the journey, they do not want to take the boat” to Europe.

Although some of the people they work with will stay in Ecuador, others “use Ecuador as a trampoline to reach the US.” That concerns her, as the America’s passage can be as perilous as an improvised Mediterranean boat crossing: trekking through Colombia’s Darien Gap jungle is “suicide,” she said. Crime and guerrilla groups extort migrants. The fees to go north are considerable: $10,000 to $20,000 to travel from Ecuador to the U.S., by land.

Dr Thania Moreno Romero, chief prosecutor for the Pichincha region, says there has always been a migration route from Ecuador to the U.S. and Canada, only the migration from here was “a local phenomenon.”

“But since 2008 when we introduced freedom of movement, we have started to see people from Pakistan, from India, Afghanistan coming to our country,” she added.

“I met someone in this cafe once, he said ‘do you want to go to America?’ he said he would take me and my daughter for $9,000. This was a Palestinian with a document from Syria. But the problem is not the money but the way. If you have a daughter – mine is now 19 – that’s a problem.”

He recalls that a friend from Sudan disappeared suddenly one day with two children, aged six or seven, attempting to reach the U.S. via Colombia. They made it, Al-Ridha said, although the father is in a U.S. immigration detention center.

“It’s very very dangerous, he go without telling me,” Al-Ridha said.

Smugglers on this journey can be protection, or a threat.

They advise migrants on the route to take and who they can meet en route. Hermel Mendoza of the Scalabrini Mission compares it to a “transnational business” that brings huge profits.

“Gangs had experience of transiting people – in the past from Ecuador to Europe and Africa. From there they started to build a network of traffickers from all these countries. Those same networks are now used by the coyotes to bring people here,” Mendoza said.

What was once like a service – guiding people on the northward trek – is now a “broader transnational smuggling network,” according to Soledad Alvarez, an academic who writes about Coyoterismo and Ecuador’s position in international human trafficking.

“With so many controls, coyotes work as in a relay race: from here to Colombia, one coyote, then another and it goes on,” she wrote in a recent paper. “Via mobile phones, Ecuadorean coyotes are connected with foreign coyotes along the route. They exchange information and coordinate payments via Western union or Money Gram for the different stretches of the route.”

Moreno, the Ecuadorian prosecutor whose office is targeting organized crime and people traffickers, says that for smugglers used to carrying contraband the smuggling of a human cargo is “just another phenomenon for them.” For migrants, however, it’s also another layer of risk.

“These people are shut up in hostels. Their ideal is just to arrive in the US, but [once on the road] they become more vulnerable and more dependent on the traffickers. They don’t know the language, the customs. They are fooled into thinking the trafficker is protecting them and they don’t want to give them up. And the person they are in with knows their family – this the way in which they have power over their victims,” Moreno said.

Until recently a large operation in Bolivia provided false documents for a fee – principally Bolivian and Venezuelan passports that would make travel through South America easier for non-continentals. Moreno said there is also more evidence of fake documents made in Brazil.

The UN’s Terminiello said “illicit traffickers are working in the region, using these routes,” and his concern is that smuggling gangs could even be trying to abuse the asylum system to buy people more time.

The impact of this trade in people has also been felt north of the border, in Colombia. In August, 2016 a bus filled with migrants from Congo and Angola was stopped travelling from Cali, in the south of the country, to Medellin. Earlier that year, the Colombian navy rescued 53 migrants from Somalia, Mali, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Haiti and Cuba whose boat was sinking as they attempted to reach land near the border with Panama. In 2016, Colombian migration authorities deported 3,700 migrants with irregular papers from Colombia’s northern border port of Turbo.

The U.S. State Department’s 2017 Trafficking in Persons Report says operations carried out by officials in Ecuador against human smugglers is on the increase: from a low of 10 in 2014, to 52 in 2016, resulting in 56 arrests. Trafficking convictions are also rising, from 20 in 2014, to 40 last year.

Tracking smugglers is a never-ending job: when one route or operation is shut down, experts say, another jungle path opens up, run by a rival. And the complicated relationship between migrant and smuggler, consumer and provider, victim and offender, means very few ever offer up sufficient testimony to lead to a conviction.

“Trafficking operations are very organized,” says Dr Ernesto Pazmiño, Ecuador’s chief public defender. “They can have a relationship with the victims and get into contact with their families. They don’t say who they are, who is behind it. That makes it a lot more complicated.”

He places blame at Europe’s door: “It is evidence of the restrictions European countries put in place that people that want to go to the US find other routes, principally through Latin America,” he says. “So the increase in people trafficking is due to the migration policies of rich countries. More borders leads to more illegal crossings, people have to pay more money. These are human beings, but countries close their doors for people to move freely.”