Ecuador: A visa story, legal expat to illegal alien

gidj.blogspot.com reported As you may have surmised from the title, we went from Expats legally residing in Ecuador, to Illegal Aliens living in Ecuador. How? We went over our T-3 Visa time and had not gotten our residency visas started. This can be a very unnerving feeling for someone who resides overseas. I will tell you how we handled it, and the steps we took to cure it. This information is current for the week of 09 Dec 2013. I don’t care what you did, or how you did it, that was different than our experience (making our experience wrong). I am smart and experienced enough to know that Ecuador has a lot of “fluid” laws that can change (or the interpretation of them) from day to day, or even person to person. Do not take this as the gospel. This is merely our experience and what we did.

Thinking of moving to Ecuador? This book may help you in your research

We both had visited border towns across the US – Mexico border quite a few times in the past. We understood these experiences could have been unique and nothing like the rest of the world. We also were as prepared as we could be for the worst. Our intention was to go to Tumbes, Peru (on the northern coast of Peru) to the Ecuadorian consulate there and get our visa situation corrected so we could be in Ecuador legally and get our residency visas started. From inside Ecuador, they can not (legally) help you if your visa is expired. Understandable. There were a couple different ways to rectify this situation, we looked at our options and decided Peru was the best answer for us. Looking back, even with the “yuckiness” it was still the best answer for us. Read Article