INEC figures detail that, until mid-2023, poverty stood at 27 percent and extreme poverty at 10.8 percent nationwide, surpassing 2022 numbers, when they stood at 25 and 10.7 percent, respectively.

Similarly, INEC recorded that 4.8 million Ecuadorians live on three one-dollar coins every day, while 1.9 million survive on one dollar and 60 cents a day.

Analysts believe that violence and insecurity have their deepest roots in poverty due to the lack of job opportunities, which has led to young people being recruited by criminal gangs operating in this South American nation.

For specialists, this situation could only be solved if the country invests more in education, health care and social protection.

Ecuadorians blame President Guillermo Lasso whose administration, a few days before the end of his term, has lacked public policies to solve these problems.

The banker will leave an Ecuador submerged in the worst wave of insecurity in its history, an energy crisis, problems in its economy, and a fiscal trance that, according to analysts, will be difficult for the newly elected president Daniel Noboa to solve in just a year and a half of government.

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