Custom Widget WP_Query problem

I have everything working on my widget except the results! I created a taxonomy called country names that we use for several custom post types. I created this widget to display tour guides (CPT) from the selected country.

The widget is working properly on the back end, but I am getting no results on the front end (ie. "No listing found"). I have echoed the $instance to the screen and it is correct, so my args or query must be incorrect. Can anyone tell why?

Here is the code:

function widget($args, $instance) {  
extract( $args );   
$title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title']);
$thiscountry = $instance['thiscountry'];
$before_widget = '!-- '.$thiscountry.' --';
echo $before_widget;
if ( $title ) {
    echo $before_title . $title . $after_title;
}
$this-getTourGuides($thiscountry);
echo $after_widget;
}

function getTourGuides($thiscountry) { //html
global $post;
$args = array(
'posts_per_page' = -1,
'post_type' = array( 'tourguides' ),
'tax_query' = array(
      array(
       'taxonomy'      = 'countryname',
       'field' = 'name', // also tried 'slug'
        'terms' = $thiscountry,
    ),    
  ),
);

//echo $thiscountry;
$listings = new WP_Query( $args);
if($listings-found_posts  0) {
    echo 'ul class="guides_widget"';
        while ($listings-have_posts()) {
            /* Get custom post type fields */
            $ecpt_website = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'ecpt_website', true );

            $listings-the_post();              
            $listItem = 'li';
            $listItem .= 'a href="' . $ecpt_website . '"';
            $listItem .= get_the_title() . '/a';
            $listItem .= '/li';
            echo $listItem;
        } // end while
    echo '/ul';
    wp_reset_postdata();
  }else{
    echo 'p style="padding:25px;"No listing found/p';
  }
}

Code for the instance:

// constructor
function __construct() {
parent::__construct(
    'btn_tour_guides_by_country', // Base ID
    'BTN Tour Guides by Country', // Name
    array('description' = __( 'Display List of Tour Guides by Country in a Sidebar'))
   );
}
function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {
$instance = $old_instance;
$instance['title'] = strip_tags($new_instance['title']);
$instance['thiscountry'] = strip_tags($new_instance['thiscountry']);
return $instance;
}

// widget form creation
function form($instance) {
if( $instance) {
    $title = esc_attr($instance['title']);
    $thiscountry = esc_attr($instance['thiscountry']);
} else {
    $title = 'Tour Operators';
    $thiscountry = '';
}
?
    p
    label for="?php echo $this-get_field_id('title'); ?"?php _e('Title:'); ?/label
    input class="widefat" id="?php echo $this-get_field_id('title'); ?" name="?php echo $this-get_field_name('title'); ?" type="text" value="?php 
echo $title; ?" /
    /p
    p
    label for="?php echo $this-get_field_id('thiscountry'); ?"?php _e('Country:'); ?/label
    select id="?php echo $this-get_field_id('thiscountry'); ?"  name="?php echo $this-get_field_name('thiscountry'); ?"
        ?php 
        $taxonomy = 'countryname';
        $queried_term = get_term_by( 'slug', get_query_var($taxonomy) );
        $terms = get_terms($taxonomy);
        //echo $term-slug;
        if ( $terms !== 0 ) {
            foreach ( $terms as $term ) {? 
         ?php                     
            echo 'option '.selected($instance['thiscountry'], $term-name).' value="' . $term-name . '" id="' . $term-name . '"', $term-name, '/option';     

               ?

                  ?php                
            }
        }
         ?

        ?php ?
    /select
    /p

?php
}