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Paper short abstract

Ecuador’s declaration of internal armed conflict reshapes everyday life in Guayaquil’s barrios. This paper reflects on how war on organized crime transforms ethnographic relations, methods and responsibilities in contexts where fear and community defense coexist.

Paper long abstract

In early 2024, the Ecuadorian state declared an internal armed conflict against organized crime groups, reframing urban life through a war logic that quickly permeated Guayaquil’s popular neighborhoods. Based on my fieldwork from 2022 to 2025, this paper reflects on how this shift has influenced the moral, political and epistemological conditions of my ethnographic research in self-built peripheral barrios such as Bastión Popular and Isla Trinitaria. As militarization intensified and criminal groups enforced their own territorial order, residents encountered polarizing categories: victim, suspect, collaborator, protected, abandoned - that simultaneously structured survival and meanings about social belonging.

These polarizations also fragment the ethnographic field. Access becomes uneven, trust becomes fragile and the distinction between “inside” and “outside” collapses when fear circulates in the urban context. Yet ethnographic practice can also reveal forms of solidarity and collective agency that resist division. In Guayaquil’s barrios, community networks, women’s groups and neighborhood leaders mobilize practices of mutual defense, care and information-sharing that counter both state abandonment and criminal coercion. This paper argues that anthropology can not be neutral in armed conflict contexts and accounts for a methodological approach that challenges the logic of violence by integrating militancy and participatory tools of representation.