In those days, the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers took place and then the Iraq War and Afghanistan War began to capture Bin Laden.
At that time, Ecuador qualified for the first time in a Soccer World Cup. People were crazy, also that year we won the Rio de Janeiro marathon in Brazil with Rolando Vera, our athletes were the consolation because our friends and family had left the country.
The Banking Holiday hit the country in 1999, and these first months of dollarization, in which the dollar repelled the sucre with the promise that prices would never rise again, this produced a new order in Ecuador.
The strange thing was that thousands of Ecuadorians left the country, especially to Spain and Italy, and it was the first massive migration of women since the possible work in those countries was caring for the elderly and in the fields, in Quito the police could not manufacture license plates for a large number of new cars.
Apparently, people no longer had confidence in banks and preferred to have their money in something that can be easily sold and what was most easily bought and sold was cars.
The day that Ecuador qualified for the World Cup, we went out with the volunteers, Verónica, my wife, and my daughters who were the Spanish teachers of the volunteers to celebrate. My second daughter Carmen Verónica, whom we nickname MONKITA, was leading the group along Reina Victoria Street with an Ecuadorian flag, towards what is now Plaza Fosch when a drunk who was leaning against a pole rudely touched her buttocks. what I and she demand. The man was an Afghan who called his family and friends who now have a restaurant called Allí Babá, came. Then a brawl broke out, but one of them pulled out a knife and stuck it in my arm, then they escaped. With my arm bleeding, we looked for them with the police, but the bleeding did not stop, the police took me to Hospital Eugenio Espejo.
In the hospital emergency room, it was necessary for him to give me blood and plasma to compensate for the great loss of blood that I had had and it caused me an almost fatal hypovolemic per-shock, the emergency doctor had to collapse the brachial artery, which is the one that had cut me that drunk afghan.
When I felt better, I went with the police to look for the person who attacked me, arrested him, and took him to the Provisional Detention Center on Juan León Mera y Roca Street. There he can see for the first time how the Ecuadorian police were corrupt, the officers released him after they received money from a lawyer who claimed to be a lawyer from the Egyptian Embassy. Today the Ecuadorian police are at the center of the controversy, as there are narco-generals, who have been denounced by the United States Ambassador in Ecuador.
Some of the volunteers did work in Quito while learning Spanish. The first place they worked was the Colegio 24 de Mayo, where my daughters were students. They also worked teaching English, rather than helping tourism students from the Central University with pronunciation.
So we signed an agreement with the Central University for our volunteers to do this work at the Faculty of Tourism, but the following year, the government of Colonel Lucio Gutierrez began to face protests.
In the city of Quito, law students from private universities began to demonstrate against the government, because from the wife to the president's brothers-in-law they were the owners of the country. The president's wife was my partner in medicine, and she handled everything related to child support, the president's brothers and brothers-in-law were assembly members, and the country became family loot.
The president promised to return his savings to the depositors stolen by the bank that failed, but now the dollar was worth double and the savings half. This was taken advantage of by the current president Guillermo Lasso, who at the time was a plenipotentiary ambassador of President Lucio Gutiérrez in the United States and the world, was also the manager of Banco de Guayaquil, a partner of Finansur and Cofiec, where Ecotrackers had an account.
Guillermo Lasso bought one of the certificates of deposit at a very reduced price, which was the papers that bankrupt bank depositors had so that they would return their money, then he exchanged them for nominal values, this turned him overnight into the richest banker in the country, while the economic situation of Ecuadorians depended above all on remittances, sent by relatives who emigrated.
In a fit of madness, President LUCIO GUTIERREZ tried to seize the Supreme Court of Justice and bring back Abdalá Bucaram, the politician most hated by the inhabitants of Quito, who overthrew him in 1996, fueling the protests.
