Why are there so many people in Ecuador named Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler?

By Jim Wyss

For outsiders who spend much time in Ecuador, the question invariably arises as to why so many people are named for well-known historical figures — and especially for infamous ones.

Vladimir Lenin

In 2017, the country elected Lenín Moreno president, voters apparently seeing no downside in the allusion to the Russian dictator of the early 20th century.

According to the national statistics institute, there were 18,464 people named Lenín registered in the country from 1950 to 2015. By comparison, in the United States, which has 20 times the population of Ecuador, there are fewer than 1,700 Lenins.

Ecuador is also full of Stalins (18,728), Vladimirs (1,518), Leons (860), Roosevelts (587), Hitlers (560), Maos (122) and Trotskys (22).

While there’s certainly an idealization of historical European leftists here, the names usually don’t follow ideological lines.

In a column in El País newspaper, Giovanni Hitler Cando said his Ecuadorian father was named Bolívar (after the Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar) and that his brother was named Stalin (Hitler’s World War II nemesis). Although he says his name has generated uncomfortable encounters over the years, he doesn’t think his father had any political intentions.

“Obviously, my brother’s name undermines the idea that I was named Hitler for ideological reasons,” Cando wrote. “Possibly [my father] thought it was amusing to witness domestic squabbles between Hitler and Lenin as if he had the power to rewrite every day of the 20th century.”