Ecuador

Resumen

Migrant smuggling has been an enduring enabling factor in the history of irregular migration from Ecuador abroad. For the past five decades, by combining regularized and clandestine paths, Ecuadorians have emigrated mostly to the United States of America. Likewise, over the last four decades, and with higher preponderance since 2008, continental and extracontinental migrants have transited through this Andean country with the intention of reaching other destinations. Were it not for coyoterismo, as migrant smuggling is locally known, those migratory projects would not have succeeded. Coyoterismo cannot be understood as something alien to Ecuador’s migratory history and culture, nor to the role it has played and still does in the geopolitics of contemporary migration; it is therefore a historical ever-changing socioeconomic and cultural process that derives from systemic inequality, while being at the same time a direct outcome of deficient national policies and the reinforced global border regime.