The Legality of (Im)mobility: Migration, Coyoterismo, and Indigenous Justice in Southern Ecuador

Abstract

Migrant smuggling has in recent decades become more prominent globally as a consequence of increasingly restrictive border and migration control policies. Whereas popular media discourses and official policy typically depict migrant smugglers as organized criminals who prey on vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers, migration scholars have instead argued that migrant smuggling is a complex marketplace involving both licit and illicit transactions and a grounded social and cultural practice through which aspiring migrants confront their lack of legal options for migration. Despite efforts to empirically situate migrant smuggling as something other than just ruthless criminal activity towards innocent victims, less attention has been given to migrants’ own understanding of their travel options and regulation of associated risks. This chapter focuses on coyoterismo -or migrant smuggling – as a community-based activity embedded in the social fabric of migrant-sending communities in Southern Ecuador. We examine the limits of the contractual relationships established between smugglers (coyoteros), money-lenders (chulqueros), and migrants and their families who rely on these services to sustain their mobile livelihoods. Specifically, we focus on how indigenous migrants from Cañar make use of multiple legal systems to assert their agency and establish accountability vis-a-vis the coyotes who facilitate their migration between Ecuador and the United States.