The U.S. Department of State has a fairly detailed breakdown based on area; if you're considering travel to one of these zones you'll want to do some further homework. Also keep in mind that the country is under a general state of emergency due to armed groups basically seizing defacto control in some areas (these groups would generally not give you any consideration for being US citizens).
https://travel.state.gov/content/tra...-advisory.html
The way business was done in the past tended to be very generalized for the entire country, which ended up with people not giving much thought to the state department ratings because an entire country would be given a travel warning due to something affecting .001% of the population in some distant enclave. Today, the people constructing these ratings are putting in the effort to be more specific to areas compared to years past, so I'd give them a little more credence.
Keep in mind that the travel advisories may not just be constructed based off the
severity and
frequency with such problem occurring, but also with
the ability of the embassy staff to get you assistance in the event of a problem occurring...either directly, or through their host nation contacts (or, lackthereof in problem areas). Be wary of travel advice on travel forums when it comes to security and safety, as they're typically making their opinions based entirely on survivorship bias instead of a data-driven look at severity and frequency, as well as being entirely unaware of challenges or enablers to embassy/host nation assistance.
ETA: It just so happens the full OSAC country security report for Ecuador was just published a couple weeks ago. These are generated by DSS Special Agents, and will give you a little more context than the Consular Affairs travel notice which is linked above:
https://www.osac.gov/Content/Report/...d-1c2aad29162d