Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here...

...at least at the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Movilidad Humana (MREMH) in the Azogues offices.

I believe that in my previous post I mentioned that that particular office has a horrible reputation amongst immigrants to this lovely country. The issue that we came across can be fairly easily remedied, if you have friends at your financial institution. I'm pretty sure we could get Ron's visa transferred with fairly little fuss now. 

What can't be overcome is the necessity for yet another marriage certificate, duly notarized, stamped as official by the Canadian government (the DFAIT, to be specific), and translated either here, or authenticated by the Ecuadorian consulate in Canada...for a fee, of course. It must also be no older than 6 months. This is according to an immigration lawyer here in Ecuador. As I'm an "amparo" or dependent, we have to prove that we are still related through marriage.

Actually, he suggested that there might be a solution, but doubted that it would work in the Azogues office. You can obtain a certificado biometrico (a biometric certificate) that lists everything that's happened in your life since you became a resident of Ecuador. This should highlight the fact that no divorce has been registered between myself and Ron. This solution has a very small percentage of working. The good news is that we can enter the country using the visa in our old passport. The lawyer says we can do this indefinitely, but we've heard otherwise. I'm sticking with the legal opinion, at least for now.

There is a solution to all this ridiculousness! But it's only for those who can meet the marriage certificate criteria...I'm talking to you, people in the process of applying for residency visas with a (spousal) dependent.

We did learn a way to avoid this horrible red tape. Register your "foreign" marriage in Ecuador. This also requires the marriage certificate and all that goes with it, but if you were to do it right away, while in the process of getting your residency, you'd have a permanent record of your nuptials that would show up on the biometrico. Of course, no one even hinted at this when we got our original visas.

So, what did we learn? It's better to go to Quito or Manta or any other office other than the one serving Cuenca. My base instinct tells me to fight the injustice, but perhaps I need to choose my battles wisely.