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A court in Ecuador has sentenced 11 air force personnel to decades in prison over the forced disappearance” of four Afro-Ecuadorian boys aged between 11 and 15 during security operations in the country’s largest city last year.
The case of the “Guayaquil Four” is widely seen as the starkest example of human rights abuses under the iron-fist security policy pursued by the rightwing president, Daniel Noboa, who placed the armed forces at the centre of the fight against drug trafficking.
Eleven servicemen were sentenced to 34 years and eight months in prison. Five others, who confessed and cooperated with the investigation, received reduced sentences of two years and six months, and one was acquitted.
“The cruelty with which the four minors were victimised has been proven,” said the presiding judge, Jovanny Suárez, who was joined by two other judges.
It remains unclear who exactly killed the boys. The trial focused on the crime of forced disappearance, and the public prosecutor’s office is still pursuing a separate investigation into kidnapping resulting in death.
On 8 December last year, Steven Medina, 11, Nehemías Saúl Arboleda, 14, and brothers Josué and Ismael Arroyo, aged 14 and 15, were returning from a football match in Las Malvinas, an impoverished neighbourhood in southern Guayaquil, when they were stopped by air force personnel – who have been deployed on street patrols since Noboa declared a state of “internal armed conflict” two years ago.
For more than two weeks, their families had no news of them, until charred bodies were found on Christmas Eve about 25 miles away.
Noboa’s defence minister, Gian Carlo Loffredo, repeatedly denied the involvement of the military and said instead that the youths had been victims of “criminal groups”.
But CCTV footage later emerged, capturing the moment the boys were assaulted and forced into vehicles.
The case has also been seen as an example of how Afro-Ecuadorians are particularly vulnerable to human rights violations: after their abduction, the boys were taunted with racist insults and beaten with punches, kicks, and blows from belts and gun barrels.
They were stripped naked and abandoned far from home, at a location where one of them managed to call his father to ask for help.
By the time the father arrived, however, the boys were no longer there. Their bodies were eventually discovered on Christmas Eve.
Forensic examinations concluded that all four had been killed by gunshots at close range to the head and back. Their bodies were then burned and dismembered.
The defence teams for the servicemen, including those who confessed to taking part in the abduction and torture, deny that they were responsible for the killings.
One of those who confessed, Christian Eduardo A. Q., said during the trial that troops were being sent to patrol the streets without any training to do so.
“I never received any training in human rights or operational procedures. I worked in the control towers in Quito as a weather observer and air traffic technician. I should never have been sent out on to the streets. They took untrained personnel, because of staff shortages, and sent us to patrol,” said the soldier.
One possible line of investigation is that, after being tortured and abandoned naked miles from home in an unfamiliar area with high crime rates, the four were killed by local criminals.
Suárez, the presiding judge ruled: “The abandonment of the minors in a dangerous and desolate place was the cause of the victims’ deaths.”
