Building hope amid violence in Ecuador

Digital art by @Pazconadie for Ojalá.

Opinion • Ana María Morales • August 21, 2025 • Leer en castellano 

Ecuador is caught between an onslaught of austerity policies and armed violence that increasingly impedes collective action.

We are experiencing multiple wars that appear isolated, their common denominator unclear. Hope no longer blossoms as it did before, and is sometimes fed by pain. Our collective sensibilities have mutated, and survival is an increasingly embodied experience. Moments of joy and feminist street parties have been replaced with healing strategies, collective mourning, and rapid responses to austerity measures that threaten lives. 

The fog surrounding it all makes it so difficult to explain.

It is from this position that I enter into dialogue with the text by Verónica Gago from Ecuador, where we are defining what we understand as war in our respective territories.

Ecuador today

On December 31, 2024, the charred bodies of four Afro-descendant children were found near the Taura Air Base, in Guayas province.

The boys were disappeared for almost a month. Cameras showed they had been kidnapped by soldiers after leaving a soccer game with friends, while they walked down the street in the Las Malvinas neighborhood, on the outskirts of Guayaquil. A criminal complaint was made, and vigils were held, organized primarily by Afro-Ecuadorian groups, neighborhood associations, and other social movements. Together, they attended the funeral of Ismael, Josué, Saúl, and Steven, singing lullabies and chigualos (Afro-Ecuadorian music and chants performed at funerals for young children).

The case illustrates the impact of armed violence (carried out by the state and paramilitary groups), and the militarization in Ecuador's urban periphery. Families across the country have reported cases of forced disappearances of young people at the hands of the military.

State-led anti-feminism, as described by Gago, is seeking, on a national and international level, to break the bonds held mainly by women and feminized bodies that sustain neighborhoods, organizations, schools, and communities.

Understanding war

In January 2024, President Daniel Noboa declared a state of internal armed conflict. A three-percent increase in sales tax followed this declaration, in line with International Monetary Fund demands.

The president argued it was necessary to increase state revenues to fight the so-called war on drugs. A war against the people was launched: an armed offensive together with neoliberal economic measures that directly attack social organizing. 

It is worth remembering that in 2019 and 2022, there were nationwide protests in Ecuador against the imposition of neoliberal policies, including against the rise in gasoline prices.

The declaration of internal armed conflict was a pivotal moment in which the notion of “war” began to resonate deeply in Ecuador. As militarization and alliances with countries like the United States grew stronger, the number of people tortured and killed increased every month. Prisons became battlegrounds where serious human rights violations have been reported.

Here, I think, is something we can connect with across different territories, including in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, that are deeply impacted by military and armed violence. As Gago puts it, it is clear the war being waged against social reproduction is destroying the very fabric of society through hunger, violence, financialization, debt, extractivism, and forced displacement.

Subjectivities are being fascistized, and understanding this is key to understanding how war is sustained and justified, and how building the notion of an enemy that must be annihilated becomes necessary for those in power.

We are not sure if “war” best explains what we are experiencing today in Ecuador, but the term does provide an opening to begin describing how conflict is playing out in our country.

The power of naming

A consistent theme throughout feminist struggle has the power of naming: naming identities, naming violence, naming demands. I think increasingly we come across feelings, explanations, and demands that are hard to pin down. We can identify with the notion of terror or precarity, for example, but how do we name them?

What we have been experiencing in Ecuador since January last year, which draws on a longer history of violence, cannot be explained away as a “war on drugs.” There are specific dynamics occurring in a parallel manner which show that war is at work, including economic policies, impoverishment, and extortion targeting small businesses and driving entire families out of their neighborhoods. And, of course, the arming of teenagers and a growing market for cocaine.

A key point in understanding our predicament is to try to decipher what lies behind the words “drug trafficking” and “illegality.” These two broad categories have been taken and used to attack community structures, economies, neighborhoods, and the lives of teenagers in particular.

The operational nature of what is happening has taken root in a space of parallel governance to the “legal” or state system, which are connected through the threads of extortion, debt, forced displacement, and extreme violence. The line between the two systems is blurred and elusive. 

This is where we can see the power of naming as a state weapon. In the last year, we have seen the creation of a subjectivity that repeats a narrative that says young, racialized men are enemies to be eliminated in the war on drugs. This narrative obscures their brutal daily lives: they are shot as they walk home, as they chat with their friends on the corner of their neighborhood, as they resist getting into an unmarked truck, or at the hands of soldiers.

As feminists, it’s important to reflect on the lives of the teenagers who have been condemned in this way. We must avoid reinforcing these categories and, rather, to introduce nuance to the conversation and try to understand the intricacies of these young lives that are being stolen every day.

Children of war

We can name many things from a feminist perspective: war against social reproduction, war against the people, centering care and affection, which support us in times of hunger and massacres. What is it what we’re naming when we center young people?

If we saw the world through their eyes, we would see that they are not soldiers, they're not necessarily hungry for power or weapons, but they do struggle internally with a thirst for revenge that comes from the murder of a loved one. We need to recognize their tenderness, humanize them, acknowledge that they care, and that they dream of their mom having a home and not working all day just to make ends meet.

If our approach is to see these young men as aggressors from the get-go, we lose the power to transform and heal. By sentencing a 10-year-old kid with a gun as an adult, we risk feeding the same fascist mindset we are fighting 

Armed teenagers are a result of patriarchal dynamics, but we cannot understand their behavior from an adult-centric perspective. Fatima Ouassak, in discussing the power of mothers, condemns “de-infantilization” as the greatest harm against racialized children.

We must recognize how children and adolescents struggle every day with multiple forms of violence—society racializes them, targets them, and labels them as criminals or mafiosos (which they are not). Shaking off this societal categorization is not an option: it is their lived reality. They are not criminals, they are criminalized. Kids just want to play!

The maelstrom of imposed violence—militarization and lethal narratives—mainly affects the most marginalized communities. Within this framework, and by learning from anti-racist traditions, working with boys and teenagers is key. Each breath of life amid so much violence is a ray of light.

How do we name our desires? As James Baldwin wrote, “You can't tell the children there's no hope.” 

Today, their song is our talisman.