White skinned Mestizos..

A white person in the upper echelons of the society identifies himself much more with a foreigner as with his own countrymen. This certainly has its roots in the history of the country with the white or Spanish ruling and the Indians and Mestizos serving them. They consider them generally lazy and uneducated and the main obstacle, why the country is not advancing. They point to a country like Argentina and think the reason that it is better off, is because of their low level of indigenous people. This upper class lives very well and sends their children to the best private schools and later on often to foreign universities. This group later then takes over the power from their parents and makes up the majority of the political and economic leadership of the country, thinking mostly in their own well being and not the country as a whole.

As for the Mestizos, who are the link between the two extremes, they tend, of course, to associate themselves much more with the white upper class as they strive of being part of it. Some of them at the extreme end deny their Indian heritage completely and to even suggest that they have Indian blood in them implicates a grave insult to them. Making up the most part of the middle class, this sector was hit hardest by the economic depression of the last years and the bank failures. It was surprising that there was so little protest over the handling of the crisis with broken promises of returning frozen bank deposits to their rightful owners, most of them middle class Mestizos. Sociologists figure it had to do with their wish to be considered part of the white upper class, which inhibited the people to fight against their desired ideal. But on the other hand this group constitutes the majority of people who leave the country to look for job opportunities overseas. More than half a million Ecuadorians work now legally or illegally in foreign countries and many more want to leave, not seeing any future in their own country, anymore.