GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador — The last thing César wanted to do was say goodbye to not just one son, but two of them, including the married one with two young children.
Aníbal, 30, offered transportation services with his own truck. Byron, 20, ran a cyber cafe. Over the years, César did everything to keep them close to home in a town nestled in the impoverished Andean province of Chimborazo, some 143 miles from Guayaquil, Ecuador’s main commercial port. His sons occasionally worked at his ranch, where they helped him with the cattle to supplement their income.
But the pandemic was too much for them and scores of other families in this striking nation of soaring mountains, lush jungles and fertile coastline that has lured thousands of American retirees to South America over the generations. A growing number of Ecuadorians are making the long journey north to the United States.
In Latin America, Ecuador is now among the leading exporters of its people. They’re arriving in the thousands — the Border Patrol encountered 17,314 in July alone — along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico.
In César’s family, Byron was the first to say goodbye in April, followed by Aníbal in July. The family asked that their full names not be used out of fear of reprisal from smuggling organizations and immigration authorities.
Aníbal took his wife and two children, ages 6 and 1, by plane to Mexico and crossed the Rio Grande in rafts from Reynosa, in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state. They were picked up by the Border Patrol and soon found themselves under a bridge in McAllen, packed together like sardines with other migrants, sitting out in the open with nothing to sleep on, surrounded by “the heat, the night, the mosquitos, the flies,” he said.
They waited for two days under the bridge before overwhelmed Border Patrol officers were able to process them and send them on to the interior to await immigration court dates.
“We even cried because the situation was so dire,” Aníbal said.
Pandemic hits hard
In the last few years, media attention on America’s migration crisis has focused on the root causes of Central Americans’ exodus to the United States. This migration occurs in such large numbers that it often overshadows the plight of migrants from South American countries like Ecuador — where people are leaving because of a pandemic that has left a trail of death and devastated economies.
In Ecuador, Byron and Aníbal’s parents, César and his wife María, were heartbroken and riddled with nagging, age-old questions when wrestling with the loss of their children and other people in the community.
“Why do we have to migrate, if we have the land, we have something to work on and we have a way to excel?” César asks himself. “But because of the situation, what we had started, what we were doing, fell through and we practically had to change the goals we had set.”
Both sons’ businesses dried up after the coronavirus pandemic hit them hard.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 71,945 encounters with Ecuadorian migrants have been recorded nationwide through July for fiscal 2021. Most occurred along the southwest border, much of which runs along Texas. In all of fiscal 2020, CBP recorded 12,892 encounters.
“We’re witnessing the third wave of mass migration” to the U.S., said Soledad Alvarez Velasco, a specialist on Ecuadorian migration via Mexico at the University of Houston, noting there were previous waves in the 1980s. Those were followed by an exodus to Europe, mostly to Italy and Spain.
“People today are leaving the country in big numbers because the conditions in Ecuador are dire,” she said. “There are no options. There is a triple crisis in Ecuador: An economic crisis, a health crisis and also a crisis that has been going on in the country that has to do with no investment, no attention at all to the rural sector.”
Around the world, people were moved by images of bodies being left in the streets in Guayaquil as the burial system was overwhelmed by coronavirus in April 2020. And although the nation is making headway in its vaccination efforts with 56% of 17.8 million Ecuadorians now at least partially vaccinated, over the past 18 months Ecuador has had almost 32,000 COVID-19 deaths, Ecuador’s Ministry of Public Health says.
Most Ecuadorian migrants are looking for work after the pandemic left them unemployed or cut off their main sources of income. Ecuador’s Ministry of Labor reported more than 700,000 jobs were lost between March 2020 and March 2021, and just over half have been recovered . According to Ecuador’s National Institute of Statistics and Census, unemployment was at 6.3% in May.
Alvarez said the current wave of migrants is mostly bound for the U.S. because of a 2018 change in Mexican migration law that withdrew visa requirements the country had previously imposed on Ecuadorians. Mexico has essentially become a way station between Ecuador and the United States, Alvarez and other experts say. Efforts were underway Sunday to return to those requirements.
Alvarez said her field work shows more Ecuadorians staying in Texas, where labor shortages in the construction and service industry offer prompt opportunities.
Migrants pay smugglers from $14,000 to $30,000, depending on their destination and the number of family members traveling. Most fly to Mexico City or Cancun and then head north to cross into the U.S., like César’s sons did.
Byron flew from Quito, Ecuador’s capital, to Mexico City in late April and transferred to Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso. It took weeks for him to get across the border. He was living with a large group of Ecuadorians and Central Americans in a bodega — a stash home for migrants. Among those waiting were two pregnant women who fell off the border wall in an earlier attempt to cross and were injured. Another woman died after she fell off the wall and cracked her head open, Byron said.
Byron tried to cross again and again, climbing over the wall only to be met by U.S. Border Patrol agents who sent him back to Mexico under a pandemic-related rapid expulsion measure known as Title 42. He said he had no alternative but to keep trying. He finally made it across through Santa Teresa, New Mexico, on his sixth attempt.
Once over a section of the border wall built during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, he ran for about one hour through the desert until he saw a sign that read “El Paso,” and spotted two young Americans waiting for him, waving. They drove him to a truck stop where he climbed into a semi hauling a mobile home. About a dozen other people were squeezed inside.
They drove overnight to Dallas, where he was “intrigued” by the skyline and thought of the shorter distance by plane he was from Ecuador, compared to where he was headed, New York, where he had relatives, friends and a job waiting for him.
“I liked what I saw and heard,” he said, adding that several migrants stayed in Dallas and spoke of a variety of opportunities awaiting them there.
Byron was driven to New York City in a U-Haul packed with about 10 others. There, he quickly landed jobs doing roofing work and washing dishes. He paid his smuggler “more than $14,000” — money he raised with the help of his parents, family, friends and bank loans. With plenty of work he plans to pay off the debt by next year, he said.
“I never lost hope in Ecuador,” Byron said. “But I lost all possibilities. Here, I find opportunities everywhere.”
Not all journeys end well. At least 13 Ecuadorians disappeared while migrating to the United States as of July 17, according to El Universo, a major Ecuadorian newspaper.
Some of their remains are believed to lie in the Chihuahuan desert that extends beyond the Chinati mountains in West Texas. It’s a dangerous place to cross.
“There are bones, remains of Ecuadorians scattered along the desert and broken-hearted families with no news of their loved ones,” said William Murillo, former immigration minister of Ecuador and director of 1800 Migrante, which offers legal help to migrants in the U.S.
Others are sent back home. Over 2,000 Ecuadorians were deported via flights in 2020, according to the Ecuadorian Vice Ministry of Human Mobility. According to Witness at the Border, Ecuador received the fifth most deported citizens from the U.S. in 2020 after Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Hope for a return home
Remittances sent to Ecuador from abroad climbed to more than $3.3 billion in 2020, according to the Central Bank of Ecuador. More than 60% of that came from Ecuadorians in the U.S.
Every day, scores of people line up, sometimes for several blocks, outside of a supermarket close to his home, César said. They are there mostly to receive money wired back from their families in the U.S.
Most Ecuadorian migrants are hoping to pay off debts and support families back home. Sometimes, they hope to return.
“That’s what keeps me going,” said Byron, “the thought of going back home to start my own business.” He’d like to start an import-export enterprise.
Still, a lot might need to change before they want to come back.
Aníbal, who now lives in a suburb of New York City, said Ecuador needs better employer regulations and incentives for entrepreneurs. And corruption in both the public and private sector needs to end, he said, because it “doesn’t let the country develop.”
He is having a tough time adapting to the way of life in the U.S., he said, mainly because of the language. He is awaiting an immigration court hearing schedule for this fall and wears an electronic tag on his ankle.
Aníbal said it was difficult to find profitable work in a region with so many migrants, but he doesn’t seem entirely dispirited.
“One comes with many hopes and dreams to succeed here,” he said. “It is not easy, but Ecuadorians know how to work ... Many of us come for a better future, for our children, to give them a better education. This is why we are here.”
César and María, both 51, hope their sons will return one day, even if they won’t be the last to leave. One of their daughters, 27, talks about heading north.
The parents spend their days caring for their cows and producing cheese.
César said he believes the country’s different regions — the Galapagos Islands, the coast, the Andes and the Amazon jungle — can provide a big, diverse labor pool. But there is little capital for entrepreneurship.
The loans and consequent interest rates that self-made entrepreneurs have to pay, he said, mean that there’s often “almost nothing left for oneself.”
“So that’s the situation: One cannot get ahead. And that’s why people leave,” he said.
In his neighborhood, each family has at least one son or daughter in the U.S., César said. “There are some communities where practically there are no more young people left,” he said.
His sons’ decision to migrate dealt “a very hard blow,” César said, because he’d tried to raise them so they could make a living in their own country.
“But the moment they made that decision, it’s like — at least for me as a parent — it seems that I didn’t give them the things that I had to give them or that I didn’t support them …,” he paused, drawing in a shaky breath, “in the things that they wanted.”
He began to cry. “That was the hardest, the saddest thing, for me, that has impacted me in my whole life,” he added. “I never thought that my children would leave.”
Staff writer Adriana María Perez reported from Ecuador and border-Mexico correspondent Alfredo Corchado reported from El Paso.
