On November 7, 2001, Uruguay was leading Ecuador by a single goal in a tense qualifying match in Quito when, as the seventy-third minute approached, Ecuadorian striker Jaime Iván Kaviedes headed in a floating cross to tie the game. The match ended 1-1 and with that result, Ecuador was off to its first World Cup.
The explosive celebrations that followed were like one big release, a swell of pent up emotions given the dire economic circumstances we were experiencing. In March 1999, the government had decreed a bank holiday after the El Niño floods, a collapse in oil prices, and multiple financial crises abroad converged to send inflation spiraling. Within days, the sucre lost 250% of its value, so to mitigate future crises, the government soon dollarized the economy in January 2000. By then, the official exchange rate had reached 25,000 sucres per dollar, compared to just 4,000 at the beginning of the previous year. Many lost their savings or saw them shrink beyond the scope of comprehension. Hundreds of thousands — eight percent of the population — left the country. Some took their own lives.
Around that time, the Central Bank of Ecuador issued an explanatory leaflet that, among other things, explained who Washington, Lincoln, Jackson, and Franklin were. In the throes of such a crisis, who could possibly care?
The sucre had been the national currency for 116 years. In 1926, when the Central Bank of Ecuador was founded, the first banknotes circulated as national symbols. The smallest denomination, the five-sucre note, featured General Antonio José de Sucre, Simón Bolívar’s lieutenant, who fought to secure our independence from Spain. Successive bills displayed images of the conquistador Sebastián de Benalcázar, the Church of La Compañía (a reminder of Quito’s Baroque heritage), the Independence Monument in Quito, and Bolívar himself. Fifty years later, a military junta introduced the 1,000-sucre note featuring an Incan general. Four more banknotes were issued as inflation ramped up in the 1990s, spotlighting the polemicist Juan Montalvo, liberal president Vicente Rocafuerte, president-turned-dictator Gabriel García Moreno, and Eloy Alfaro, who led the Liberal Revolution of 1895.
In a country with limited access to books or newspapers, banknotes functioned as small, illustrated historical texts that passed from hand to hand, reinforcing the national narratives imposed from above. Still, it was difficult to decipher what these images truly conveyed about Ecuadorian identity while they existed. Above all, they were a reminder that a nation—our nation—was in many ways nothing more than a social construct, a political community that imagines and sustains itself through shared narratives.
By the end of the 20th century, these narratives stood in stark contrast to an unpleasant reality: one of a debt-ridden nation that excluded and marginalized a vast segment of its population. In 1990, CONAIE, the largest Indigenous organization in Ecuador, sought to reverse centuries of exploitation by calling for a major uprising that would improve the quality of life for Indigenous groups. Among other demands, it called for the legalization of ancestral lands, bilingual education, and the recognition of Ecuador as a plurinational state. “We have been living as Indians for 500 years,” a confederation leader had told the press. “Now we want to live as citizens.”
Around this time, Dušan Drašković, the Montenegrin manager of Ecuador’s national team, ended a long tradition of automatically calling up players from major teams in the country’s biggest cities. Instead, he got in his Fiat and traveled across every province of Ecuador in search of the players who could take us to our first World Cup. When the call-ups were finally decided on merit rather than favoritism, it turned out that the majority of Ecuador’s most talented players hailed from Esmeraldas and El Chota, territories home to the country’s largest Afro-Ecuadorian populations, which had never found representation on the national currency. A decade later, that search bore fruit, culminating in the Kaviedes goal that drove our streets wild.
One of the few collective joys Ecuador experienced in this period was that World Cup qualification in 2001, as we were without a national currency and with our spirits on the floor. The explosion in public support for the national team—we draped the entire country in Tricolor jerseys—reinforced Ecuador’s existence in the collective imagination, even as eight percent of the national population was now living in the United States, Spain, and Italy.
Since then, it’s been twenty-five years of instability (after President Jamil Mahuad, who dollarized the economy, was ousted in a coup in late 2000, we saw five presidents in seven years), political polarization, the proliferation of street gangs and money laundering, the loss of rights driven by an increasingly authoritarian government, and the rise of drug trafficking—motivated, in part, by our dollarized economy—which now permeates everything. Just last year, Ecuadorean football was marred by betting rings, match-fixing schemes, and the killings of three players. We now live suspended in that reality.
Amid all this, economists have maintained that the dollar provided stability to the country as we fully integrated into the global market. In terms of football, this meant that clubs began investing in youth development infrastructure to give their young players early international exposure. It was once difficult to imagine that football could become a major industry in Ecuador, a country without the trappings and know-how surrounding the sales, loans, or player transfers. In 2002, only three of its national team members were playing internationally: Álex Aguinaga at Club Necaxa in Mexico, Ulises de la Cruz at Hibernian, and Agustín Delgado at Southampton. Today, of the thirty-four players called up to the national squad for the friendly matches preceding the 2026 World Cup, only five play for Ecuadorian teams. The remaining twenty-nine play in the Premier League or in leagues across Europe, Brazil, the U.S., Mexico, and Argentina. One Ecuadorian player, center back Willian Pacho of Paris Saint-Germain, has earned a spot in FIFA’s “The Best” XI for 2025.
Among the few certainties we Ecuadorians have been able to count on in recent years is the fact that we have now qualified for five World Cups, no small feat in the realm of symbolic representation. We are no longer a nation with timeless truths inscribed on banknotes, but rather a portable country dispersed throughout the globe. What unites us is intangible and can be transported from one place to another: our extended families scattered across the world, yes, but also, our rituals and dreams, the music of immortals like J.J. and Carlota Jaramillo, the recipes of our cuisine, and our passion for gathering in public squares, sitting beside the radio, illicitly streaming a match online, or going into debt just to attend the stadium—all to follow the Tricolor.