Blanca Vega, from the Ombudsman’s office, defended the measures on the grounds that Ecuador had been overwhelmed by extending the broad terms of the Cartagena Declaration to so many Colombians, and that neither Colombia nor the international community has done enough to help shoulder the burden placed on Ecuador by the influx of refugees.

But others believe the changes mark a shift in Correa’s political calculations. His government appears to have been caught unprepared by the social consequences of its immigration experiment, and observers note that xenophobia has increased in Ecuador, where the media often links crime to Colombian immigrants. Under the left-wing presidency of Colombia’s Juan Manuel Santos, relations between the two countries have also improved in recent years, reducing the incentive for Correa to poke his finger in the eye of his neighbor by touting his open-door policy for Colombian refugees.

In Lago Agrio, Maria Lorena Suares Ostos, UNHCR’s regional director, showed me a pin-covered map of Ecuador’s border regions. We were in the biggest city of a province that covers 60 percent of the border, she explained. A few hours to the north, the Colombian side is rife with armed groups and landmines. As a result, those fleeing violence have to travel lengthwise along the border before they can cross the Putumayo River and flood into small, overwhelmed border towns. One of Correa’s recent decrees disqualifies asylum-seekers who don’t request the status within 15 days of entering Ecuador. But by the time most refugees reach Lago Agrio, where they can officially apply for asylum, it is often well past the deadline. Ostos estimates that 85 percent of the migrants fleeing Colombia are poor farmers escaping generalized violence, and adds that they often aren’t even aware that they can apply for asylum.

Since the Ecuadorian government does not disclose how many asylum applications it receives—officials at the Interior Ministry repeatedly dodged my calls, emails, and visits—it’s tough to know how acceptance rates have changed since Correa’s decrees. But at the peak of the country’s open-borders immigration policy, in 2009, Ecuador recognized 25,021 refugees in one year. According to the latest available figures (from the third quarter of 2013), the government was on track to grant asylum to fewer than 700 people last year. And because the state is now reviewing the cases of thousands of people previously granted asylum and revoking many of these decisions, the total number of refugees in the country is actually falling. Official statistics show that the number dropped to 54,865 by last September—a decrease of nearly 2,000 over the previous 18 months.

As a result, between 2012 and 2013, the United Nations doubled the number of cases in which it tried to resettle Colombian refugees in countries other than Ecuador. The U.S., the largest recipient of resettled refugees, has increased its quotas to take in an additional 300 to 400 Colombians in Ecuador over the last two years, according to UNHCR's Vincent Briard. But resettlement cases always represent a minority of the need, and they have to adhere to the increasingly restrictive requirements of each host country. The legal systems in the U.S. and Canada, for example, disqualify most of the Colombians streaming into Lago Agrio because they are farmers who grew coca in areas controlled by armed groups (and were thus contributing to a criminal or terrorist group, albeit at the lowest level). Argentina takes in 100 Colombian refugees in Ecuador each year, but it wants mostly single men with construction experience.