In 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, acting on input from a group of veterinary researchers, began investigating whether the increasing popularity of grain-free dog foods had led to a sudden rise in a potentially fatal heart disease in dogs, dilated cardiomyopathy.
Four years later, the FDA has found no firm link between diet and dilated cardiomyopathy. Nor has it rejected such a link, and the research is ongoing. Publicity surrounding the suspected link, nevertheless, has driven down the once-promising market for grain-free dog foods.
Furthermore, a tangled web of pet food industry funding and interests may have influenced the origin, data collection and course of the FDA study, according to an examination of internal FDA records and extensive reporting.
A six-month investigation by 100Reporters has found that veterinarians who prompted the FDA to consider diet have financial and other ties to the leading sellers of grain-inclusive pet foods. Additionally, agency records show that for the initial study, some vets were instructed to submit only dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) cases that implicated grain-free, “exotic” or “boutique” pet foods. Suppliers of ingredients used in grain-free dog foods have also exerted pressure on the FDA to protect their market.
Data from the US Foods and Drug Administration
Dana Brooks. Photo courtesy of the Pet Food Institute.
Consequently, some say the conversation around DCM and grain-free food is deeply divided, with each side claiming the other is serving competing agendas and prioritizing industry relationships over scientific integrity and the lives of pets.
“This became such an emotional issue,” said Dana Brooks, CEO of the Pet Food Institute, whose members produce most of the pet foods and treats in the US. “We’re scrambling to try to even determine what’s going on.”
Dana Brooks, CEO of the Pet Food Institute
Grain-free diets started to become popular for pets in the early 2000s, in response to a desire among owners to move away from grains that were thought to provoke allergies in pets. This period also saw a wave of gluten-free foods in humans, which spilled over into the pet food market. “Pet foods reflect the interests and the tastes of their owners,” said Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “You make foods that are designed to appeal to owners.”
Grain-free diets are more expensive than grain-inclusive ones, said Gregory Aldrich, an animal nutritionist and associate professor at Kansas State University and president of Pet Food Ingredient and Technology, Inc., which offers nutrition and technical services to pet food manufacturers and ingredient suppliers. Pulses — seeds from legume plants including peas, beans and lentils that are commonly used to replace grains in grain-free food — have more protein and less starch than grains, making them more costly for manufacturers and consumers, Aldrich said.
Nestle, author of Pet Food Politics (University of California Press, 2008)
Marion Nestle. Photo by Bill Hayes.
Source: US Food and Drug Administration, January 2014- April 2019.
In 2016, pulses became particularly popular in pet foods, with 124 new pet food products containing them introduced in the US that year. By 2019, approximately 43 percent of dry foods sold were grain-free, reaching $5.4 billion in sales . Total pet food and treat sales hit almost $37 billion that same year.
During this period in 2017 and 2018, veterinarians started seeing an influx of dogs with DCM, the second most common heart disease in canines. In larger breeds like the Doberman Pinscher, the disease has a prevalence of over 50 percent, while in smaller breeds, it’s very rare. Overall, less than one percent of dogs are estimated to have this disease. Once heart failure from DCM begins, the survival time is typically less than one year . In some cases, the dog dies suddenly before any symptoms appear.
Some of these DCM cases were reported to the FDA, which typically sees one to three reports of the disease annually. However, between January 1 and July 10, 2018, they received 25 case reports.
Seven of these cases were submitted by a single source: professor, veterinarian and animal nutritionist Lisa Freeman from Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.
FDA records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, however, indicate that those reports may not have been fully representative of cases seen at the Tufts clinic.
In a June 2018 email to Jones, Freeman attached a document showing that her center had instructed vets to report cases to the FDA, “If patient is eating any diet besides those made by well-known, reputable companies or if eating a boutique, exotic ingredient, or grain-free (BEG) diet.” Exotic ingredients include kangaroo, duck, buffalo, tapioca, salmon, lamb, bison, venison, barley and pulses.
When asked if this request could be perceived as cherry-picking the data at a seminal stage of the investigation, Freeman responded through Tufts University’s media relations, stating: “The protocol in that email was developed for and intended to help veterinary cardiologists in the early stages of the investigation into potential associations between diet and dilated cardiomyopathy.”
Dr. Lisa Freeman, Tufts University
According to the FDA, the document shared by Freeman was generated by Tufts veterinary staff for use by Tufts veterinarians.
“The FDA has never requested that DCM cases reported to the agency be limited to certain diet types,” an FDA spokesperson wrote in an email. “We welcome all DCM reports with a suspected link to food, regardless of the type of diet.”
Freeman has a long history of receiving funding from pet food companies including Nestlé Purina Petcare, Hill’s Pet Nutrition, and Mars Petcare. This is common within the field of animal nutrition, as a large portion of funding for studies on pet food and nutrition come from big pet food companies.
According to PubMed.gov, Freeman has produced scientific work funded by Hill’s and Mars since 2002 and Purina since 2004. Over the past 20 years, she has been an author on studies funded by these pet food companies around 30 times. In recent years, Freeman has included a more detailed conflict of interest declaration than those seen in her past studies, which states: “ In the last 3 years, Dr. Freeman has received research funding from, given sponsored lectures for, and/or provided professional services to Aratana Therapeutics, Elanco, Hill’s Pet Nutrition, Nestlé Purina PetCare, P&G Pet Care (now Mars), and Royal Canin.”
In response to questions about payments from Mars, Hills and Purina and the DCM cases she presented to the FDA early on in the investigation, Freeman stated the following through Tufts University’s media relations: “I stand behind the research that my co-authors and I have contributed to this body of work, and I have transparently disclosed the sources of funding for the work I conduct on this topic. I respect the scientific process and am hopeful that continued advances in research will help clarify the association between diet and DCM.”
Two other veterinary cardiologists — Darcy Adin from the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine and Joshua Stern from the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine — also collaborated with the FDA. In an FDA update on the investigation , the agency named the three, saying that “ FDA veterinarians have been working with Drs. Lisa Freeman of Tufts University, Joshua Stern of UC Davis and Darcy Adin of the University of Florida to learn more about their research findings and the cases they’ve encountered.”
Emails obtained from a public records request indicate that the connection between DCM and grain-free dog food was first suggested in 2017. In March 2018, Jennifer Jones, a veterinary medical officer at the FDA assigned to the investigation, received an email from a vet asking to “discuss our findings on dilated cardiomyopathy and dietary relationships in our clinic over the past year.”
The emails show that the following month, Freeman, Adin and Stern discussed their clinical observations surrounding grain-free dog foods and DCM in a call with the FDA, after which Jones asked them to email her spreadsheets of their case data.
Adin has been involved in studies that received funding from Purina since 2018 and, since 2017, from the Morris Animal Foundation, a nonprofit animal health charity founded by Mark Morris, Sr., who created the first line of dog foods produced by the company that would become Hill’s Pet Nutrition.
Adin commented through University of Florida public relations that she has never directly received funding from the Morris Animal Foundation or Purina, but was a primary and co-author on studies into an unrelated heart condition, degenerative mitral valve disease, funded by the Morris Animal Foundation.
Source: US Food and Drug Administration
University of Florida public relations
“I completely understand conflict of interest concerns with people being funded by the pet food industry and I acknowledge that that is something that we are up against,” Stern said in an interview, noting that this also applies to researchers and veterinarians who don’t believe there is a connection between DCM and grain-free food. “It’s hard to find a veterinary nutritionist that hasn’t done research for pet food companies.”
All three veterinary schools also have close ties to the pet food industry — another common issue in this field. For example, UC Davis has a Hill’s VIP Market program where faculty, residents and students get discounts on Hill’s food, and Purina has donated $50,000 annually to the veterinary school’s Center for Food Animal Health since 2006. Purina has also funded scholarships for students at the University of Florida. In the early 2000’s, Tufts had a Hill’s Resident Research Fund, and Purina has offered resident research grants and scholarships for student representatives.
Purina, Hill’s and Mars produce some of the most popular grain-inclusive dog foods, including Purina Pro Plan and Purina ONE, Hill’s Science Diet and IAMS Proactive Health (IAMS is owned by Mars). They all also sell grain-free diets. However, grain-inclusive foods are key drivers of dry dog food sales across the industry.
Purina, Hill’s and Mars did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Joshua Stern, University of California at Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine
On July 12, 2018, the FDA publicly announced its investigation . Many of the 25 dogs with DCM that spurred the investigation did not have a genetic predisposition for the disease, causing concern among vets. The common thread, the FDA reported, appeared to be a grain-free diet.
“ Early reports from the veterinary cardiology community indicate that the dogs consistently ate these foods as their primary source of nutrition for time periods ranging from months to years,” the FDA wrote.
In a June 2019 update, the FDA went further, naming 16 dog food brands that appeared most frequently in their DCM case reports. This was shocking, said Brooks . “We’ve never seen anything like that before without a certainty of the cause.” Over 90 percent of the listed brands were grain-free.
Joseph Bartges, a professor of animal medicine and nutrition from the University of Georgia’s College of Veterinary Medicine, was not surprised that the dog food brands named most frequently in the DCM reports were grain-free. He noted at the American Feed Industry Association’s 2020 conference that the FDA announcement and updates on the investigation seemed to urge pet owners to report dogs with DCM who were eating grain-free food.
“When you only look for what you want to see, you only see what you look for,” Bartges said during an interview.
Following the announcement of the investigation in July 2018, reports of DCM cases skyrocketed. By July 2020, the FDA had received over 1,100 reports of DCM in dogs .
This drastic increase is likely because the FDA encouraged veterinarians to report the disease, said Brooks . In a November 2020 statement , the Pet Food Institute, Brooks’ organization, wrote that current research suggests “that a variety of factors may influence the development of DCM.”
The investigation was also covered extensively by the media , likely influencing the public’s purchasing decisions .
In subsequent research, Adin reported that dogs with DCM that are eating grain-free food may get better when they change their diet. Adin and colleagues examined the medical records of dogs diagnosed with DCM or congestive heart failure that were in one of two dietary groups — those who were only on a grain-inclusive diet, or those who were on a grain-free diet and then switched to a grain-inclusive diet. Both groups also received standard medical treatment.
They discovered that dogs that switched from a grain-free to a grain-inclusive diet lived an average of 465 days compared to 263 days for dogs only on a grain-inclusive diet. Additionally, researchers found that dogs on a grain-free diet developed DCM, on average, at around six years old, compared with dogs on a grain-inclusive diet who developed the disease at around nine years old, suggesting that diet may be a risk factor .
Throughout its investigation, the FDA has repeatedly stated that DCM is a complicated issue involving multiple factors, and the link to diet is suspected but not proven. They also noted that there are an estimated 77 million pet dogs in the US, and most have been consuming pet food of all types without developing DCM.
Steven Solomon, director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM), emphasized this point during a September 2020 symposium at Kansas State University, in what some described as a bid to “walk back” the tie between diet and DCM, implied when the FDA associated the 16 brands of dog food with heart disease in dogs.
In a speech, Solomon said that “DCM is a scientifically complex, multifaceted issue,” adding that “we at CVM currently do not view this as a regulatory issue,” meaning they are not requesting any food recalls, though they welcome new scientific research.
Yet since Solomon’s appearance, the investigation has gone silent. So silent, in fact, that at least one veterinarian in the field thought the investigation was closed. However, it is still ongoing, according to an FDA spokesperson asked to comment.
Some believe this silence is because the FDA is trying to distance itself from the investigation due to lack of evidence linking DCM to grain-free food . Others say it’s because of pressure the agency received from the pulse industry, which has profited significantly from the grain-free pet food trend.
In fact, the USA Dry Pea & Lentil Council’s 2019 annual report stated the organization “convinced the FDA to clarify their language about their concerns and minimize the damage to the industry .” A newsletter by the US Pulse Industry also noted that BSM Partners — a pet care research and consulting firm that works with Zignature, one of the 16 pet food brands listed in the FDA update — aimed to raise $5 million for three research projects to “determine the real cause(s) of DCM in dogs.” As of 2018, pet food companies pledged to donate $3 million to this effort, and the pulse crop industry set a goal of $1 million. After a request for comment, the newsletter was removed from the Northern Pulse Growers Association website.
Meanwhile, research into DCM has continued. This March, Freeman published another study funded in part by Purina concluding that dogs with DCM or heart defects that precede cardiac failure who were eating grain-free diets had small but significant improvements in their hearts after switching to grain-inclusive diets.
Anna Kate Shoveller, professor of animal nutrition at the University of Guelph in Canada, and her team also presented findings at the 2021 American Feed Industry Association conference on the impact of pulses in grain-free diets on Siberian Huskies’ cardiac health. They fed the huskies one of four diets with varying amounts of pulses over a 20-week period and found that their cardiac health did not change based on the quantity of pulses consumed.
Regardless of how much more time and money goes into this research, the FDA investigation has already had a substantial impact on the pet food market. Since June 2018, the market for grain-free dry dog food has been on a decline , with the brands named in the FDA investigation seeing a particularly steep decrease in sales up until the last half of 2020, according to NielsenIQ, a data analytics company.
The reason that this steep decrease in sales stopped may be due in part to the pandemic, which brought about a surge in pet industry sales. In fact, these sales in the U.S exceeded $100 billion for the first time ever in 2020 and a survey by the American Pet Association found that owners spent 11 percent more on pet food that year as well. However, overall grain-free sales continued to decrease by $60 million in 2021.
Grain-inclusive dog food sales — which were down 5 percent at the start of the FDA investigation — saw a spike in 2019. Those sales slowed in 2020, but nevertheless, they continued to grow by $700 million from June 19, 2020 to June 19, 2021.
From the beginning of the investigation to 2020, there was a 19 percent shift in volume from grain-free dry dog food to grain-inclusive food, according to former NielsenIQ retail client director, Brad Boldrige.
Veterinarians like Aldrich and Bartges don’t think there will be a clear answer to the DCM question anytime soon. This is in part, they say, because nutritional studies on dogs with DCM are expensive and difficult to conduct. It’s also likely there are multiple factors contributing to this disease, including a dog’s breed, their individual physiology and even other environmental factors, said Brooks .
The powerful influence of the pet food and pulse industry over animal nutrition science is also going to make getting a clear answer about the disease difficult, said Nestle . “They’re all trying to protect their market share,” she said.
Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly described the founder of the Morris Animal Foundation, Mark Morris, Sr., as the founder of HIll’s Pet Nutrition, and said that a Hill’s employee chaired the foundation’s board.
This article, which is being co-published with the Associated Press, was produced with financial support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, legal guidance from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and administrative support from Freelance Investigative Reporters and Editors.
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Fitah, 32, Somalia Fitah has been a refugee for ten years but has only been in Brazil for a few months. After leaving his home country in 2007 due to the civil war, he went to South Africa, where he stayed until March 2017. Paying $4,000 USD to smugglers in Johannesburg, he managed to enter Brazil posing as a South African refugee. He wanted to travel on to the United States, but the “travel package” offered by his smugglers only gave him two options, Turkey or Brazil. He chose the latter.
Afonso, 28, Congo Upstairs in one of the big bedrooms of the Scalabrinian Mission Afonso, a 28-year-old migrant from Congo, explained how he came from Kinshasa in 2015 by boat, escaping from the violent conflicts raging in his own country. He hired the service of smugglers and came on a cargo ship with a number of others. He paid for part of the trip by working on the ship. He was left in the coast of Santos, a city 55km away from Sao Paulo. He is now searching for a job.
“K.”, 39, Sierra Leone At Caritas, a non-profit providing support to refugees and migrants, we met “K” (who asked not to reveal his full name), who had left Sierra Leone three months ago. His grandfather was a chief priest of a secret society for whom it is a tradition to initiate the oldest son of the family when the former elder dies. A Christian and a graduate in Information Technology, “K” refused to take part in the ritual and says he was then targeted. He fled to stay with family in the interior of the country, but was kidnapped and held captive in the forest. One night he managed to escape to the city and met a woman from a Christian organization which provided airplane tickets so he could leave immediately for Brazil.
Jorge, 25, Guinea-Bissau Jorge is a trained engineer who came to Brazil two years ago, who is now selling counterfeit and smuggled clothes in a local market. His Brazilian girlfriend is now pregnant and he is waiting for a work permit in order to get a job as mason. He said that when Federal Police went to his home address to confirm he was living there - an essential step in the process of issuing a work visa to a migrant - his house mates thought they wanted to arrest him and denied he lived there. It delayed his chance of getting a permit that would allow him a legal and better-remunerated job. The lack of trust in Brazilian law enforcement is a huge issue among refugees and migrants, many say that they rarely provide help or support, but instead only make their lives more difficult.
Abu, 37, Senegal In República Square in the downtown Centro neighbourhood, African migrants sell clothes - some of them counterfeit designer wear,, some not - and handicrafts. Abu, 37, from Thiès in western Senegal, came to Brazil in 2010 with the hope that World Cup would make Brazil a prosperous country and offer him a new life. He says migrants should be respected for having the courage to leave everything behind and restart from nothing. Discrimination and lack of jobs are an issue for Abu, so he says his plan now is to save money and go to Europe as soon as possible. When he first arrived, he had money to stay in a hotel for seven days. After that, he met people who got him a job as a street vendor for contraband and traditional Senegalese clothes sewn in Brazil with African fabrics. Every time the police come and seize the goods he sells, it can take up to five months to recover the money lost.
Ibrahim, 41, Senegal Members of the Senegalese community gather in República Square every week for a party, mounting up their own sound system, bringing drums and singing. On the night we visit around 50 people were dancing and chanting traditional Senegalese songs. Later they take a seat and discuss issues important to the community. Ibrahim, one of the group, has a talent for sewing fake Nike and Adidas logos to clothing in an improvised atelier nearby. Although he is a professional tailor and prefers to dedicate his time to his own original work, he says financial pressures meant he was forced to join the market of counterfeit designer-label clothing.
Guaianazes street, downtown Sao Paulo
On Rua Guaianazes there is a run-down mosque on the second floor of an old and degraded building, which is frequented by many African migrants. Outside, the smell of marijuana and cheap crack is inebriating. Crowds gather on the streets in front of the packed bars, while different people ask us if we want cheap marihuana. We enter one bar that has literally no chairs or tables: there is a poster of Cameroon’s most famous footballer Samuel Eto’o on the wall, and a big snooker table in the centre while all around customers gamble, argue and smoke. The bar tender tells us it is a Nigerian bar, but that it is frequented by Africans of all nationalities. Among the offers of cheap marijuana, crack and cocaine, laughs, music and loud chat, you can barely hear to the imam's call. Rua Guaianazes is considered to be the heart of Cracolandia, a territory controlled by organized crime for more than a decade and now reportedly home to some African-led drug trafficking gangs.
Santa Efigenia neighbourhood Santa Efigenia is an area of around ten street blocks in the heart of the Centro area where locals says you “won't find anything original product or any product that entered the country legally”. There are dozens of galleries with local merchants, migrants and hawkers selling their wares, and crowds shouting and grabbing to sell counterfeit and contraband electronics late in the night. When we visited, a homeless old man was setting a campfire out of trash to heat himself on the corner, the people passing by aggressively yelling at him due to the black smoke his improvised urban survival mechanism was generating.
“H”, 42, Angola “H” is an Angolan woman now living in a house rented from the Baptist church. The area outside the house is a “boca de fumo” - an open drug dealing spot managed by armed guards. “H’s” house is annexed to the church building itself, and is very rustic and simple. She arrived a year ago with two of her children, and also pregnant. She says that after the family of the Angolan president took over the market of smuggled goods in her country, her small import business started to crumble. Her husband and two more daughters are still there. She is currently unemployed, but happy that her young son is studying, although often he comes home complaining about racism at school. “H” does not want him to play with the neighbourhood children, she is afraid he will be drawn to narco-trafficking if he gets in with the wrong crowd. In the long run, she wants to go back to Angola, but only under “a different political situation.”
Lalingé restaurant, Sao Paulo Arami, the owner of the bustling restaurant Lalingé – which means “The Princess” in her language – has been in Brazil for seven years. She opened the restaurant a year ago so that the African community in the Centro neighbourhood has a place to gather and eat food from their continent. It’s the kind of place people arrive at any time of the night or day, order their food and chat.
Scalabrinian Mission, Canindé neighbourhood The Scalabrinian Mission in the neighborhood of Canindé provides philanthropic aid to migrants. Soror Eva Souza, the director, says they have helped people from Africa (Angola, Congo, Guinea, Togo, Nigeria, South Africa, Mali, British Guyana, Somalia, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Uganda), North Africa and the Middle East (Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt), Asia (Cambodia, South Korea, the Philippines, Bangladesh), Europe (The Netherlands, Russia, France) and Latin America and the Caribbean (Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Haiti, Cuba). The Mission provides housing, food, clothing, medication and facilities for migrants. They only receive a small amount of financial support from local government, but work to help migrants find a job so they can live independently. Souza says many of those who arrive at the house are ill: some are seriously injured, others sick from the journey or the conditions they were living in before arriving in Sao Paulo. Since 2015, she says she has seen human trafficking and slavery victims, drug mules, political refugees, and people who have lost their families en route. When we visit 40-year-old Mohamed Ali, from Morocco, was trying to find a job with the support of the Mission.
Clement Kamano, 24, Guinea-Conakry Kamano was studying Social Sciences at Université Général Lansana Conté when he took part in the protests of September 28th, 2009, which ended up in a massacre with more than 150 people killed. Afterwards, he was repeatedly harassed because of his involvement in social movements. Fearing he might be killed, his father bought him a ticket to Brazil. Now he is a political refugee, who is almost fluent in Portuguese, and who enjoys talking about the sociologist-philosophers Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, even Leibniz and Nietzsche. He is currently applying to join a federal university in Sao Paulo.
What’s “cereza” in Arabic? In a bright classroom in the centre of Quito, a group of students sit around a whiteboard. “Yo veo la televisión con mis amigos en la tarde,” they repeat after the teacher, “I watch television with my friends in the afternoon.” “Yo tomo el bus par ir al trabajo,” “I take the bus to go to work.”
Around the table are two Syrians who fled the war, one Cameroonian who says he wanted to escape the Anglo-French conflict in his homeland, two Afghans, one a former top-ranking police officer, an Egyptian and a Sri Lankan who wanted to go anywhere where he could make enough money to help his family. Migrants who arrive in Ecuador from Africa, Asia and the Middle East face a steep learning curve: it might be relatively easy to enter the country, thanks to Ecuador’s liberal open-border policy, but finding work here and learning Spanish can be difficult. Today their teacher is translating between Arabic, Spanish and English. “Market”? asks one. “Souk” replies another member of the group, while a fellow student does a quick translation into Pashtu.
Experts say some of those who come through language centres like these are planning on continuing their journey north, others on staying in Ecuador.
A little piece of Nigeria, in Quito As the night closes in, Grace, a 25-year-old law graduate from Cameroon, dashes between a barbeque out on the street and the kitchen in the small Nigerian restaurant where she is working the night shift, as a television showing an African football league plays in the background. She wears a dark top, and her hair pulled back, as she fans the tilapia grilling on the coals. When she was denied a Canadian visa, despite having a scholarship, she decided she still wanted to leave Cameroon, where she complains of a lack of jobs and opportunities for the country’s English-speaking minority. With three friends, she bought a ticket heading west for Ecuador where she heard she could enter with her invitation to study at a language school. She soon converted to a missionary visa, and now works here and sings in the choir at a church up the hill, teaching Sunday school at the weekends. Like many of her customers, she also wants to travel north to the US or Canada, but only with the correct papers. “If you go without papers and through the jungle, you might be lost. Then my family is lost as well.”
The Afghan police officer Asadullah, a former police officer, spent 31 years training new recruits and fighting terrorist groups in his country. Among the documents he smuggled out with him is a photograph of him with Robert Gates, the former US Secretary of Defence, paperwork from a training programme at the National Defence University in Washington DC, and training certificate from the George C Marshall centre in Europe, signed by the German defence minister.
His career had been high-profile and illustrious, but while that brought recognition from the Americans and their allies, it also brought him the unwelcome attention of the Taliban and other extremist groups.
For three years before he fled, he says terrorists were calling him saying he needed to end his work with the police. “Come and work with us,” they’d coax. When he refused, someone tried to throw acid on his child at school – that was when he decided to leave.
Today the family are renting a spacious flat in central Quito, with a big beige sofa and swept wood floors. A big TV is mounted on the wall behind him, and one of his children brings in sweet tea and fruits. His wife and six of his children are with him, awaiting a decision from the migration authorities on their asylum case. For the sake of his children – who all speak English – Asadullah wants to go to the US.
“I want to go to America, but it’s a process: it will take a lot of time,” he says. “We have been waiting to get an answer. I only came here because the bad people wanted to kill us. I’m just here so I’m safe.” He considered going to Europe, but considered the route there more dangerous. “Many Afghan people wanted to go to Europe, to Turkey, but many people died in the sea.”
The Artist Mughni Sief’s paintings once made him a well-known artist in his native Syria: he taught fine art in a top university, and was invited to Lebanon to show his work. But since the war, and his decision to flee, his paintings have taken on a darker tone. One , “Even The Sea Had A Share Of Our Lives, It Was Tough” touches on the horrors so many Syrians have seen as they try to flee to safety.
“This painting is about Syrians crossing the sea to go to Europe from Turkey. I put this fish head and cut the head off to show the culture of ISIS. This here is the boat people,” he explains in his spartan apartment in Ecuador’s capital, Quito. “Syria was empty of people, and there are so many people dying in the sea.”
From the windows of his bedroom-come-studio, you can see the mountains, washing hanging in the sunshine on a neighbours balcony, beige tiles. Behind him the bed sheets – which came with the house – are adorned with images of teddy bears and the phrase “happy day.”
In the corner is a small, rolling suitcase in which he brought his wood carving tools, crayons, and charcoals from Syria: everything from his old life that he dared bring without alerting attention that he was leaving the country. In a small backpack he bought a Frederick Nietshce paperback, a birthday present from a friend, and a book he bought in Syria: “Learn Spanish in 5 days”. He didn’t bring any photos, in case his bag was searched.
Frustrated by restrictions he faced as a Syrian in Lebanon, he started to research other places where he might make a new start. He read that Ecuador was “one of the few countries that don't ask for a visa from Syrians. I had problems leaving Lebanon, and in El Dorado in Colombia but at Quito I came in no problem. The only question was: why are you coming to Ecuador, do you have money? I said nothing about asking for asylum so they just gave me a tourist visa.”
Soon after he made his asylum application, and today, he paints while he waits for a decision. “Before the war I was focused just on humans, on women, but when the war started that changed, and I began focusing on the miserable life that we live in Syria,” he says as he arranges three paintings on the bed. In one, he explains, is a woman who can’ face something in her life, so prefers to stop speaking.
Tricked Although many of the migrants that make their way to Ecuador are able to travel more independently than those making the journey across the Mediterranean, examples abound of exploitation of some who arrive here. Mohammad, for example. He’s a 24-year-old from Sri Lanka who first tried his luck in Malaysia, but was cheated by a travel fixer who took his money while promising him a work visa that never materialized. When he was arrested for working without the proper documents, a friend had to come and pay the police to get him out. Travelling west, to Ecuador, after religious violence broke out in his hometown, he says he paid someone he knows to help sort out his travel, unsure of how much he took as a cut. When he flew in, alongside a Sri Lankan family, the agent arranged for him to be picked up by an unknown woman who charged each of them again to take them to a hostel. He is now renting a room from a man he met at the mosque. Every day continues to be a struggle, he said.
“At home, I saw so many troubles each day. I decided to come here thinking maybe things will be good. But I did one week working in a restaurant, they treated me like a slave. For three months I was searching for work. They are good people here but I have no opportunities here. Seven months I have nothing, I’m wasting my time.”