Xenophobia

By: Paula Vaca

Ecuador is a country with a large number of refugees and economic migrants, mostly from Colombia, Peru and in the recent years also from Venezuela and Cuba. Colombians are being associated with  very bad reputations, marked as thiefs, robbers, drug dealers, prostitutes and simply as persons not be trusted. It is true that there is a lot of crime here, Thefts  very often occur in the crowded buses and the Perpetrators are extremely  skilled.

In reality immigrant in Ecuador are very often targets of xenophobia. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that Colombian refugees are often mistreated by the police and treated with wariness by much of Ecuadorian society, because they have been ”stigmatised as delinquents.