Guayaquil

Every commodity cycle Ecuador has ridden began on the same muddy riverbank. Guayaquil sits where the Guayas River—South America's widest river at its mouth—meets the Pacific tidal system, creating a natural port that handles 92% of the country's imports and 55% of exports. Francisco de Orellana established the Spanish settlement at this site in 1537, and buccaneers attacked it so regularly that 'burning Guayaquil' became a recurring chapter in Pacific pirate histories. The city was rebuilt in wood each time, only to burn again—a pattern of destruction and reconstruction that preceded and prefigured its commodity boom-and-bust cycles.

Cacao made Guayaquil globally relevant. By the 1880s, Ecuador supplied 20–25% of the world's cacao, all flowing downriver to Guayaquil's wharves. The 'Gran Cacao' elite built European-style mansions and sent their children to Paris. When cacao blight and the 1929 crash destroyed the industry, displaced agricultural workers flooded the city, creating an urban underclass that reshaped its politics for generations. Bananas replaced cacao in the 1930s when United Fruit converted former cacao plantations—the same river infrastructure, the same port, a different crop. On 9 October 1820, Guayaquil became the first Ecuadorian city to declare independence from Spain, and in 1822 it hosted the famous meeting between Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín that determined South America's political future. The coastal city has always seen itself as more commercially minded, more internationally connected, and more politically independent than highland Quito—a rivalry that maps directly onto Ecuador's geography.

Ecuador exports 30% of the world's bananas—6–7 million tonnes annually—and over 95% transit through Guayaquil's refrigerated cargo facilities. The port processes roughly 2.4 million TEUs and is being challenged by DP World's new deepwater facility at Posorja, sixty kilometers south, which offers 16-meter berths versus Guayaquil's 12-meter river depth. The banana industry generated $3.38 billion in exports; shrimp and cacao ($950 million) follow. Ecuador's dollarized economy—it adopted the US dollar in 2000 after a banking crisis—provides stability but eliminates monetary policy flexibility, making the country uniquely dependent on commodity prices it cannot control.

Drug cartels discovered what the banana traders already knew: Guayaquil is the most efficient export corridor on South America's Pacific coast. Gangs began stashing cocaine in banana shipments, and by 2024 the city experienced unprecedented violence—shootings, kidnappings, and extortion became routine. President Daniel Noboa declared a state of emergency. Port operations continued through the crisis, handling the same volumes, but the parallel between legal and illegal supply chains sharing identical infrastructure reveals how deeply the port's geographic advantage cuts both ways. Guayaquil's future depends on the same question it has faced since the cacao era: can the city capture more value from commodities passing through, or will it remain a transit point—profitable when prices rise, vulnerable when they fall?