Urban Fear, Criminality and the Erosion of Intangible Cultural Access in Machala: A Critical Qualitative Content Analysis of Ecuadorian National Digital Press

Abstract

This article examines how the Ecuadorian national digital press has represented the relationship between criminal violence, declining mobility, tourism contraction, and the erosion of intangible cultural access in Machala, Puerto Bolívar, and the route to Jambelí during 2025. This study aims to explain how mediated representations of insecurity can contribute to the symbolic narrowing of culturally meaningful urban–coastal spaces, even when those spaces remain materially present and formally open. The article responds to a gap in the literature at the intersection of critical heritage studies, media framing, urban fear, and Latin American security studies. The existing research has examined heritage as social practice, media representation of crime, and urban securitization, but has rarely connected these fields to explain how criminal violence erodes lived access to intangible cultural environments in secondary port cities of the Global South. Methodologically, this study applies qualitative content analysis to a purposive corpus of eight focal journalistic texts published in Ecuadorian digital outlets, such as El Universo, El Comercio, Expreso, El Mercurio, Extra, Primicias, GK, and La Hora. Deductive–inductive coding was complemented by descriptive article-level indicators of themes, keyword clusters, and temporal distribution. The findings show that the press did not merely report violent events; it progressively reorganized the symbolic meaning of Machala by re-signifying Puerto Bolívar, the marine environment, the cabotage pier, and the maritime route to Jambelí as spaces of risk, interruption, and conditional access. This study contributes conceptually by defining intangible cultural access and symbolic enclosure, empirically by documenting the mediated erosion of coastal public–cultural life, and practically by proposing integrated policy actions for security governance, cultural reactivation, local commerce, maritime mobility, and responsible public communication.