The horror settled in Ecuador with the discovery of four charred bodies near an Air Force base on Christmas Eve, in the midst of the unsuccessful search for four minors missing after a military operation on December 8.
So far there are only macabre clues: the charred corpsesa video released by Congress in which the alleged capture of one of the children is observed and 16 soldiers linked to the case in custody.
The justice system determined that the minors between 11 and 15 years old were victims of forced disappearance at the hands of the military during an operation.
The versions found among the government, authorities, human rights organizations and relatives raise a pall of doubt in a country hit by violence and under military pressure against drug gangs.
This is what is known about the case.
Saúl Arboleda, Steven Medina and brothers Josué and Ismael Arroyo went out to play a soccer game in the south of Guayaquil on December 8 and never returned.
That night a stranger contacted the Arroyo family and put Ismael on the phone. His father recounted that call to the media.
The soldiers “came down like crazy, chased us, fired shots in the air, mistreated us and left us stranded,” said the young man, according to Luis Arroyo’s version.
Later, relatives received two locations through WhatsApp, one of them in the town of Taura, where there is a military base. The other near a shrimp farm.
In another subsequent call, an anonymous person assured the family that “the mafia took them.”
On December 24, after the justice system determined that there was a “forced disappearance,” four bodies were found in a mangrove area, near the Taura military base, according to local media.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights expressed its “concern” about the disappearance and assured that it “will continue to monitor the actions of the State to search for the children and investigate the facts.”
The UN Human Rights Office and Unicef asked Ecuador to “exhaust all mechanisms at its disposal to investigate the facts in an exhaustive, agile and impartial manner.”
Organizations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) have denounced serious human rights violations within the framework of the tough policy that President Daniel Noboa installed against drug trafficking.
In a still unverified video released by the National Assembly, a group of soldiers can be seen putting one of the children into a van and beating him, while another remains face down in the vehicle.
The Minister of Defense, Gian Carlo Loffredo, assures that the incident occurred while the uniformed officers were responding to a request for help due to a robbery. The Prosecutor’s Office indicated on Tuesday that there is no evidence to support that version.
The bodies “are destroyed and incinerated,” which makes identification difficult, Billy Navarrete, executive director of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights of Guayaquil, who accompanies the parents, told the press.
The relatives of the missing were called on Christmas Day to appear at the Guayaquil morgue. “Now the anthropological (identification) is underway,” based on the particular characteristics of each child, Navarrete explained.
If that doesn’t yield results, DNA testing will be done which takes 30 to 40 days.
Noboa asked to intensify the search and expressed his intention for the minors to be declared “national heroes.”
The Prosecutor’s Office requested that a date and time be assigned to file charges against the 16 soldiers who participated in the operation.
On Monday, the authorities raided the Taura base and confiscated the phones of those accused and the vehicles in which the minors were transported.
The Ministry of Defense placed the 16 investigated by justice under arrest in a military installation. Intelligence personnel monitor the uniformed men to prevent them from escaping.
Loffredo said this Thursday that “nothing the children have done justifies why they are missing today.”
“They are trying to position in the minds of Ecuadorians that the military are crazy people who go out in groups of 16 to tour the soccer fields to kidnap and disappear minors,” said the minister.
The case is reminiscent of that of the brothers Santiago and Andrés Restrepo, arrested and disappeared by a police squad in 1988, during the government of the right-wing León Febres Cordero. In 2011 the investigation was reopened, but their bodies have not been found.
(With information from AFP)
