Ecuador Families Torn Apart as Parents Go to Europe
Sun May 4, 2003 12:17 PM ET By Amy Taxin
QUITO, Ecuador (<a href=asia.reuters.com>Reuters) - Wearing a name tag around her neck, 13-year-old Diana waits at Ecuador's airport to board a jet that will take her to join her parents for the first time since they emigrated to Europe three years ago.
Preparing for the trip from Quito to Amsterdam then on to Milan, the shy teen-ager shows no fear of making her first flight, but she is nervous about life in a new country and a new language.
"We'll have to see if I can get used to it," said Diana, who hopes to stay with her parents in Milan now they have obtained Italian visas after leaving their poor homeland in search of jobs.
In Ecuador, a nation with one of Latin America's highest migration rates, dozens of children board transatlantic jets by themselves every day to rejoin their parents in Europe, hoping the joy of reunion will help ease painful memories of years of separation.
More than half million Ecuadoreans have emigrated since an economic crisis hit the small Andean nation in 1999. People left homes and even children behind in a frantic rush for a better life.
Faced with the option of a treacherous journey through the Mexican desert to cross the U.S. border illegally on foot, many opted for Europe where more relaxed visa rules made it much easier to travel by plane with just a passport in hand.
Ecuadoreans can currently travel to many countries in Europe without a visa while the United States requires one. But the European Union will begin requiring visas on June 1 and there is currently a rush of people trying to beat the deadline.
Already more than 350,000 Latin Americans live legally in Spain -- a four-fold increase from 1996 -- while many others live in Italy. The two nations were sources of heavy migration to Latin America during the 19th and 20th centuries and now the migrants' grandchildren are seeking a way back.
In nations hit by economic chaos like Argentina, Venezuela and Uruguay or by poverty like countries in the Andes and Central America, it's hard for people to see a bright future.
In Ecuador, officials say budding economic recovery has done little to stem the tide of migration as crisis-weary citizens set their hopes on a new life in the developed world.
"People have lost their faith in our country," said Leonardo Carrion, director of Ecuador's office for residents abroad. "They just want to leave."
TEARFUL GOOD-BYES
Indian women wearing embroidered blouses and ankle-length skirts huddle together clutching the wire fence around Quito's airport to watch the planes that will whisk their families to Europe, maybe for good.
But as they shed a tear, many who stay behind know migration is the only way for their families to put food on the table in a nation plagued by 60 percent poverty and where remittances have become one of the biggest sources of cash.
Families in Ecuador are traditionally close knit, but money remittances can't make up for the absence of parents who left their children under the watchful eye of elders or neighbors so they can earn enough to pay the bills.
In the southern Andean highlands near Cuenca, many villages have been left almost entirely in the hands of women. Some later join their husbands overseas, but many marriages simply dissolve under the strains of time and distance.
"After losing two or three generations, we've cut the cycle of passing down education, knowledge, values," said Franklin Ortiz, who works with migrants' children in a church-sponsored group in Cuenca. "The entire family structure has changed."
Officials say it's tough to pin down the precise number of Latin Americans living in Europe since many don't need entry papers and simply travel with tourist visas to the EU legally.
But many end up becoming illegal immigrants by overstaying their visas to take jobs on the black market. They pray an eventual amnesty will push their papers through.
At least that's the hope in Ecuador, as people book last-minute flights hoping to gain admittance to Europe before the EU's visa requirement goes into effect in June.
BLACK MARKET SMUGGLERS
Spain counted 132,628 Ecuadoreans with resident permits in June 2002, 81,709 Colombians and 37,863 Peruvians, followed by Dominicans, Argentines and Cubans.
Although Spanish authorities hope to crack down on illegal immigration by requiring visas, experts from the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration (IOM) say the policy may end up pushing people into the hands of traffickers working in the $10 billion-a-year business of human smuggling.
"Even if it does put the brakes on migration, it can also eventually create channels for irregular migration and immigrant trafficking," IOM's regional advisor for Latin America, Jose Angel Oropeza, told Reuters from Geneva.
Latin Americans from nations which need visas may buy fake passports from dealers in countries like Bolivia where no visa is required to enter the EU freely. Or they seek financing for their travels from powerful loan sharks, taking on massive debts before they even board the plane.
Faced with a shortage of manual labor and the EU's lowest birth rate, Spain took steps to draw Ecuadoreans, Colombians and Dominicans across the Atlantic by offering private sector jobs via local embassies in exchange for a visa.
The Iberian nation also relaxed rules this year to allow people of Spanish ancestry to apply for citizenship.
That doesn't mean life for immigrants is easy in Spain. Reports of alleged xenophobia keep some would-be immigrants at bay and human rights group Amnesty International has denounced police treatment of foreign nationals.
But many immigrants see no other choice as their nations fail to put wobbly economies on stable footing, and where the minimum wage is hardly enough to keep children from going hungry, let alone to send them to school.
Joselyn, a 29-year-old Ecuadorean mother who earns $900 a month waiting tables in Mallorca, holds back a tear while talking about the 9-year-old daughter she has left behind in her hometown of Riobamba nestled in the snow-capped Andes.
"I've been gone from Ecuador for many years and she doesn't know me so well," the young mother said, waiting for her flight back to Europe after a fleeting vacation with her family. "But what else can we do? All our struggle is for them."