The legacy of both empires is reflected in Ecuador's ethnically diverse population, with most of its 17.8 million people being mestizos, followed by large minorities of Europeans, Native American, African, and Asian descendants.

Ecuador is a representative democratic presidential republic and a developing country[21] whose economy is highly dependent on exports of commodities, primarily petroleum and agricultural products.

The untimely death of both the heir Ninan Cuyochi and the Emperor Huayna Capac, from a European disease that spread into Ecuador, created a power vacuum between two factions and led to a civil war.

In the case of Ecuador, Flores based Ecuador's de jure claims on the Real Cedulas of 1563, 1739, and 1740; with modifications in the Amazon Basin and Andes Mountains that were introduced through the Treaty of Guayaquil (1829) which Peru reluctantly signed, after the overwhelmingly outnumbered Gran Colombian force led by Antonio José de Sucre defeated President and General La Mar's Peruvian invasion force in the Battle of Tarqui.

Ecuador during its long and turbulent history has lost most of its contested territories to each of its more powerful neighbors, such as Colombia in 1832 and 1916, Brazil in 1904 through a series of peace treaties, and Peru after a short war in which the Protocol of Rio de Janeiro was signed in 1942.

San Martín's plans were thwarted when Bolívar, descended from the Andes mountains and occupied Guayaquil; they also annexed the newly liberated Audiencia de Quito to the Republic of Gran Colombia.

In five months, New Granada defeated Ecuador due to the fact that the majority of the Ecuadorian Armed Forces were composed of rebellious angry unpaid veterans from Venezuela and Colombia that did not want to fight against their fellow countrymen.

During colonial times this was to halt the ever-expanding Portuguese settlements into Spanish domains, which were left vacant and in disorder after the expulsion of Jesuit missionaries from their bases along the Amazon Basin.

Hostilities erupted on 5 July 1941, when Peruvian forces crossed the Zarumilla river at several locations, testing the strength and resolve of the Ecuadorian border troops.

The 1944 Glorious May Revolution followed a military-civilian rebellion and a subsequent civic strike which successfully removed Carlos Arroyo del Río as a dictator from Ecuador's government.

However, a post-Second World War recession and popular unrest led to a return to populist politics and domestic military interventions in the 1960s, while foreign companies developed oil resources in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

[46] The Guarantors of the Rio Protocol (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States of America) ruled that the border of the undelineated zone was to be set at the line of the Cordillera del Cóndor.

While Ecuador had to give up its decades-old territorial claims to the eastern slopes of the Cordillera, as well as to the entire western area of Cenepa headwaters, Peru was compelled to give to Ecuador, in perpetual lease but without sovereignty, 1 km2 (0.39 sq mi) of its territory, in the area where the Ecuadorian base of Tiwinza – focal point of the war – had been located within Peruvian soil and which the Ecuadorian Army held during the conflict.

The coup d'état was led by General Guillermo Rodríguez and executed by navy commander Jorge Queirolo G. The new president exiled José María Velasco to Argentina.

He governed until 24 May 1981, when he died, along with his wife and the minister of defense Marco Subia Martinez, when his Air Force plane crashed in heavy rain near the Peruvian border.

The population has been motivated by government failures to deliver on promises of land reform, lower unemployment and provision of social services, and the historical exploitation by the land-holding elite.

Its main body is the National Electoral Council, which is based in the city of Quito, and consists of seven members of the political parties most voted, enjoying complete financial and administrative autonomy.

[85] A 2003 Amnesty International report was critical that there were scarce few prosecutions for human rights violations committed by security forces, and those only in police courts, which are not considered impartial or independent.

The Galápagos Islands are well known as a region of distinct fauna, as the famous place of birth to Darwin's theory of evolution, and as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

[134] This is explained to an extent by emigration and the economic stability achieved after adopting the U.S. dollar as official means of transaction (before 2000, the Ecuadorian sucre was prone to rampant inflation).

However, starting in 2008, with the bad economic performance of the nations where most Ecuadorian emigrants work, the reduction of poverty has been realized through social spending, mainly in education and health.

[142] Ecuador also produces coffee, rice, potatoes, cassava (manioc, tapioca), plantains and sugarcane; cattle, sheep, pigs, beef, pork and dairy products; fish, and shrimp; and balsa wood.

Among other notable Ecuadorian scientists and engineers are Lieutenant Jose Rodriguez Labandera,[156] a pioneer who built the first submarine in Latin America in 1837; Reinaldo Espinosa Aguilar, a botanist and biologist of Andean flora; and José Aurelio Dueñas, a chemist and inventor of a method of textile serigraphy.

In the Highland Andes where a predominantly Mestizo, white and Amerindian population exist, the African presence is almost non-existent except for a small community in the province of Imbabura called Chota Valley.

[178] The doctors assigned to rural communities, where the Amerindian population can be substantial, have small clinics under their responsibility for the treatment of patients in the same fashion as the day hospitals in the major cities.

Ecuador houses a small East Asian community mainly consisting of those of Japanese and Chinese descent, whose ancestors arrived as miners, farmhands and fishermen in the late 19th century.

The town of Ancón experienced of wave of immigration from the UK starting in 1911, when the Government of Ecuador conceded 98 mines, occupying an area of 38,842 hectares, to the British oil company Anglo Ecuadorian Oilfields.

The classic paradigm of the Italian immigrant today was not that of the small trader from Liguria as it had been before; those who emigrated to Ecuador were professionals and technicians, employees and religious people from South-Central Italy.

[200] From 2007, the Ecuador government created multiple initiatives to attract Ecuadorians abroad mostly from the United States, Italy, and Spain to return after many left during the 90s economic crisis or La Decada Perdida.

Ecuadorian painters include Eduardo Kingman, Oswaldo Guayasamín, and Camilo Egas from the Indiginist Movement; Manuel Rendón, Jaime Zapata, Enrique Tábara, Aníbal Villacís, Theo Constanté, Luis Molinari, Araceli Gilbert, Judith Gutiérrez, Félix Aráuz, and Estuardo Maldonado from the Informalist Movement; Teddy Cobeña from expressionism and figurative style[214][215][216] and Luis Burgos Flor with his abstract, futuristic style.