Between ‘Trochas’, Orphans and Mourning: Migrant Mobilities and the Effects of US ‘Soft’ Remote Control in Ecuador

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a two-scale analysis of how US border externalisation is spatially embedded in Ecuador, producing place-making transformations. On a national scale, it has turned Ecuador into a ‘soft’ buffer to halt unwanted global migration to the US. On a cuerpo-territorio scale, it has had at least two effects. On the one hand, it has transformed migrant-sending communities into mourning and orphaned places as a direct effect of Ecuadorean migrant disappearances and deaths en route and the multiplication of child orphanages. On the other, instead of halting illegalised crossings of global migrants heading to the US, it has multiplied them via unlawful river and land border pathways locally known as trochas, which have increased across the Ecuador-Colombia border. Trochas are socially built spaces embodying fear, anguish, pain, struggle and resistance. As the article proves, mourning and orphaned places and trochas are shaped at the convergence of the effects of the geopolitics of externalised control and the politics of life that Ecuadorean families and global migrants continually deploy to sustain their mobilities and lives. These place-making effects derive from Ecuador’s twofold role as a sending and transit country for global migration to the US, an effect which ends up being highly productive to justify the redoubling of US border enforcement across the region and its increasingly overt meddling in security and border control matters in Ecuador.

Acknowledgements

My deepest gratitude goes out to Aida Yantza for all her knowledge and guidance and for opening the doors to the communities where I worked in Azuay. I also thank the members of those communities for teaching me so much about their harsh experiences and sustained struggles. Finally, I acknowledge Maribel Casas-Cortés, Sebastián Cobarruvias and Paolo Novak for their careful reading and feedback on the earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. My thesis, ‘Trespassing the visible. The production of Ecuador as a global space of transit for irregularized migrants moving towards the Mexico-U.S. corridor’, was presented and defended at the King’s College London in 2019.

2. This project was developed by Colectiva Infancia, a research network on children’s migration across the Americas and co-coordinated by Dr Valentina Glockner and me. Our project won a grant from the National Geographic Foundation. See: https://infanciasenmovimiento.org

3. The Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador is a collective of geographers, social scientists, and activists concerned with territorial conflicts in Ecuador.

4. For a more detailed description of my methodological approach and ethical considerations when researching with children, see https://infanciasenmovimiento.org.

5. The Palermo Protocol is the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the U.N. Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. It is a criminal law binding international instrument adopted by the General Assembly in November 2000 with 117 signatory countries (UNODC 2004).

6. Coordinator of Anti-Trafficking and Anti-smuggling Unit, Ministry of Government. Interview conducted in Quito, March 2016.

7. In Ecuadorean migrant sending communities to migrate ‘por la chacra’ alludes to migrating across land borders in an unlawful manner, usually with the guidance of coyotes. Chacra is a Quichua word for farm, agricultural field, or land. Other expressions with that same meaning are to migrate ‘por la pampa’, pampa also means field or land o ‘por el camino’ which means go down the road. The expression ‘por la chacra’ refers to the whole journey from Ecuador to the US.

8. While I conducted my fieldwork, 1–800 Migrantes had an office in Cuenca. Currently it only operates from New York. See: https://1800migrante.com.

9. Legal Representative of 1–800 migrant. Interview conducted in Cuenca, June 2016.

10. Director of the Undersecretary of the Ecuadorian Migrant Community of the Vice-Ministry of Human Mobility, Interview conducted in Azogues, June 2016.

11. Dario, Truck driver. Interview conducted in Quito, December 2016.

12. Border agent. Interview conducted at the Ecuadorean checkpoint, Rumichaca International Bridge, September 2016.

13. Local border inhabitant in Lago Agrio, Ecuadorean Amazonean border. October, 2022.

14. Local Coordinator of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Orellana. Interview conducted in Quito, March 2017.