In Latin America, people are talking about the “return of the military” or the “new militarization.” Multi-mission Armed Forces are deployed in internal security, control of illegal mining, prison control, public order, and national and international humanitarian missions. In previous governments, they held positions in the public bureaucracy, always as a benchmark of authority from the citizenry, which gives the Armed Forces high scores in institutional credibility surveys. In Ecuador, the discourse and postulates of Military Civil Relations or civil primacy, sustained as principles of democratic governance, have not interested the political class, nor the media, worse still, in the academy specialized in defense and security. The paper proposes to understand this relationship from a perspective anchored in the theories of power, as authority or symbolic capital, forged in the mobilization of the meanings of the institution in the construction of the national, in a country marked by regional, cultural, and geographic differences.