🇪🇨Voice#03: Inflated Ecuador: An Almuerzo (Lunch) has Tripled
How the Inflation has Affected People in Ecuador
The following article has been written in collaboration with a person living in Ecuador to document his experiences and how he tries to navigate living in an inflated and unstable government.
The National Crisis
7 years. What would you consider basic necessities for daily life? Food? Gas, perhaps? Because in 7 years, the prices of both have never been higher.
Yes, Ecuador has seen an inflation rate at its highest since July 2015. But it’s not just the basic amenities. The price of everything from imported and luxury goods to locally made ornaments and clothing has all skyrocketed. Everything is more expensive, and who gets to feel the blunt edge of this economic crisis, which many argue that the president is directly responsible for?
The Day-to-Day Struggles of Quito Residents
Food is up, and so is hunger. There isn’t a severe shortage of the former, so where does this particular issue stem from?
Political and economic issues aside, the president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, seems to play a significant role here. By not giving them enough time to repay loans, local farmers are forced to seek what’s easily the fastest way to get their money: price hikes.
An Almuerzo, which means lunch in Spanish, used to be a staple of many Ecuadorian diets. You can walk into any Ecuadorian restaurant and order simply “lunch,” and they will serve you roughly the same thing: some chicken, a bit of rice, some beans, and fried plantain for dessert. It doesn’t seem that long ago that each restaurant charged very close to precisely the same price:
$1. “That’s just the price of lunch,” said a friend. These days, though, you’d be lucky to find it for less than $2, but the city-wide average? $3.
To the American tourist, that may not seem all that expensive, but to a local who has to provide for a family of 4 on about $300/month, the difference between $1 and $3 is the difference between eating and starving.
How are people coping?
It’s a late afternoon outing with friends. We stop by for a quick snack of empanadas at a small stand by the street corner. While the transaction is ongoing, I can overhear small comments about how costly day-to-day items have become, including the empanadas we’re here to buy.
I can afford these empanadas just fine. I’m doing…just fine. The affluent mainly cope, and so do tourists and ex-pats. But many of my friends aren’t rich. If you’re from my native Oregon or anywhere in the US, you might not be used to the social division that plagues Ecuador.
It’s a very classist society, where political and affluent classes rarely mingle with the masses, so the decision-makers do not understand or even hear about the plight of the average person in the country.
I typically spend time on both sides of the aisle, and the conversations among the poorest of my friends have lately revolved around just trying to survive. Every day staples like shrimp and fish are hitting record prices, and gas price hikes are slicing out their bottom line.
The richest among my friends talk more about political instability, “how everyone is suffering” (even though I know they’re not), and how the protesters need to be quashed. They can be insufferable at times. They think I don’t understand South American problems because I’m not from South America. They don’t understand poor issues because they refuse to speak to the poor.
Hope for the future?
On a grand scale, the events in Ecuador are merely a reflection of the economic crisis that slowly looms on a global scale. Soaring gas prices and arguments about political situations–the war in Ukraine, for example–are primarily to blame. I believe there is hope yet uncertainty.
Ecuador seems like it’s always going through a political crisis, yet they seem to come through–at least until the next.
succinct yet impactful. glad i stumbled into this. are you on Twitter?