This article analyses strategies for channelling a migrant population out of a country by indirect means. Specifically, we examine the response of the Ecuadorean state to the influx of Venezuelan newcomers since 2015. We argue that this response has been characterised by inaction, rooted not in policy failures or bad governance, but rather in a strategic governmental rationality. We show how migrants are ‘herded’ out of the country as a result of a form of indirect government that works differently from other ‘anti-immigrant’ policies like forced deportations or incarceration at the border, and yet produces similar outcomes.

This article analyses the impact at a local level of the changes that have been introduced within the framework of the Plan Nacional del Buen Vivir (National Plan for Good Living, PNBV) in Ecuador since 2007. It assesses the extent to which there has been real change in local administration and governance and, if so, the impact in areas such as economic development, innovation and quality of life. Fieldwork was carried out across three towns and cantons – Zaruma, Piñas and Portovelo – in the province of El Oro. Historically, these have been characterised by their dependence on the primary export model that the government of Rafael Correa has sought to move beyond. The progress and limitations of this process are assessed within the context of the National Plan for Good Living.

Homicide statistics are a widely accepted metric of security and democracy. This article argues for a focus on how bodies come or do not come to be counted – of what happens before states enumerate. The experience of São Paulo relates that how many people die and how many do not is connected to the governance of an organised crime group known as the PCC. The punishment practices of the PCC and groups like it throughout Latin America reshape the lived paradigm of governance over life and death, albeit in concealed ways. Statistics are produced by and are productive of a de jure state, different from the state de facto. The acceptance of state-made homicide figures, whether for analysis, visualisation or political claims, is consequential for the future of lived security and social science knowledge production.