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

Abstract

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.