This investigation collected testimonies of eight members of the military who admit that the government of Daniel Noboa deployed them to the streets without a clear strategy, exceeding their own capacity. Pressured by the demand to show results, the soldiers reveal that, without proper orientation and training for their new missions, they ended up breaking the law.
The soldier speaks slowly. His voice trembles. He pauses, as if gauging the damages, before responding:
“They demand results from us. Members of the military are expected to find drugs, weapons, and to capture criminals. The problem is that we have no intelligence, no information. They don’t guide us to specific objectives. So, when militaries capture a group of criminals in order to fulfill their missions, they start torturing them in order to obtain information. The same was true in prisons.”
“Are they waterboarding prisoners? Are they torturing them with electric current?”
“No, not with current. We cover their heads, mouths, and noses. A lot of water is poured over them. This leads to despair and suffocation. That’s when they start talking. But that is not authorized. It should not be done. There are soldiers who, as I said, get carried away. They arrive at a place and suspect a person of being in an organized crime group simply because of their tattoos.”
For him, a military officer who claims to have been threatened and warned of a possible attack against him by the leader of a criminal gang that had co-opted one of his colleagues, the pressure to show "results" in the internal war launched in Ecuador has resulted in the internal protocols of the Armed Forces to remain on paper. In practice, he acknowledges, forbidden methods, such as torture, have become commonplace. The officer says that, without effective military direction and supervision in the missions, the internal armed conflict has become an opportunity for their peers to increasingly commit crimes.
President Daniel Noboa declared Ecuador’s internal via an official decree during his first term. Back then, the government classified 22 criminal gangs as terrorist organizations and belligerent non-state actors and tasked the Armed Forces to "neutralize" them.
The internal war stripped soldiers of their natural functions: guarding Ecuador's porous borders, safeguarding national sovereignty, and operating in contexts of external defense. They took on non-military missions: indefinitely managing the prison system (which has been going on for more than a year and a half) and conducting urban patrols (which bring them face to face with the civilian population.) Tasks that belong to the police.
That operational transformation, experts say, opened the door to more abuses by the military on the streets.
Tierra de Nadie and CONNECTAS detected, with information provided by the Ecuadorian Attorney General's Office, that the first year of the internal war ended with an increase in the number of complaints of abuses by military, police, and other public officials. Crimes such as torture almost quadrupled, going from 52 cases in 2023 to 195 in 2024. Extrajudicial executions went from 6 to 19, and extrajudicial executions increased from 118 to 272.
Reports of forced disappearances doubled from 12, recorded in 2023, to 26, documented in 2024.
In contrast, by cross-checking testimonies, the records of the CDH (Comité Permanente para la Defensa de Derechos Humanos de Guayaquil), and during field work, the team of this investigation identified 43 people who disappeared after having been detained in irregular operations and raids by the military in the same year. Most of those raids occurred during the night and at dawn in three coastal provinces: Los Ríos, Esmeraldas, and Guayas. Eight of them, including the children of Las Malvinas, were found dead.
To better understand the backdrop of these abuses, this team reviewed hundreds of judicial documents, classified reports, and internal Armed Forces protocols, and interviewed eight active and passive military personnel, former intelligence officers, investigating officers, experts, public officials, victims' families and the organizations assisting them.
Their testimonies and the information gathered in the documents depict an internal war being fought without a defined strategy, with an additional and often unexplored element: pressure put on the military aimed at achieving the arrest of high-value criminals and seizures of weapons and drugs has led to arbitrary arrests and torture as a method of extracting data for new arrests, as part of the absence of intelligence operations and the state of exhaustion of the military sent to perform police functions, for which their tactical training did not prepare them.
The review of the cases and the soldiers' own testimonies confirm another finding: two of the mandatory protocols that regulate military action and the use of force during operations against military targets and outside of combat are not being complied with.
Luis Cordova, researcher at Observatorio Ecuatoriano de Conflicto, says that the pivotal point for the decision of the government of Noboa is that "neither the Armed Forces nor the Police are prepared for a context of war, worse still, an urban war. The last war fought by Ecuador was against Peru, 30 years ago! That is why there are issues with intelligence, criminal infiltration, and coordination between the forces.”
Córdova warns that as long as the demands for results continue (dismantling criminal organizations and arresting high-value targets) more abuses will keep happening, without guarantees that the information or results they achieve will be true. "It already happened in Colombia with the false positives, when they killed farmers and dressed them up as guerrilla members to fulfill the quota of deaths demanded of them. If more political pressure is put on them, they will migrate to much more extreme practices of violence." He questions the fact that an urgency has been overlooked: "There is no criminal policy in Ecuador. The military are not criminal profilers and that is the tight spot: demanding them to solve this problem under the expectation of war".
It is an expectation that is diluting. In the first half of this year there was a 47% increase in murders, going from 3,143 homicides between January and June 2024 to 4,619 in the same period in 2025, according to a report by the OECO (Observatorio Ecuatoriano de Crimen Organizado).
The Hidden Cost of Military Control in Prisons
In 2024, a military officer took on the mission of ensuring the security of a mega-prison for several months. When he arrived, he recalls, he took charge of one of the prison's security checks, a task that should have been in the hands of the police and prison guards.
"I realized that there was no control, and the police officers were letting in drugs and cell phones. While making the rounds, we were informed that a police officer was earning 20,000 dollars for cell phones. Picture it, each cell phone that costs three hundred dollars outside may cost more than a thousand dollars here. So, he says, he began searching for stashes, drugs and weapons.
However, the officer recognizes that military control of the prisons made a structural problem worse: "Staff started getting compromised. We have recommended relays because staff cannot spend more than three months in the same prison. But due to lack of personnel, they are kept longer. That has been a huge risk.”
The identity of the military officer is being withheld to protect his safety and integrity. Tierra de Nadie Investigation Unit and CONNECTAS
Taking that risk had its effects: fifteen members of the military were arrested in June 2024 when they allegedly tried to enter at least twenty cell phones, tablets, and cash into La Roca, Ecuador's maximum security prison in Guayaquil, where criminal leaders categorized as "high value targets" are confined. The soldiers were working on the prison's security perimeter.
In August of the same year, another military officer was arrested with computers, cell phones, cigarettes, and chargers in the security checks area of the Guayaquil regional prison.
In June 2025, there was a new alert: nineteen soldiers and two prison guards were indicted for allegedly participating in the escape of Federico “Fede” Gómez, leader of the criminal gang Los Águilas, who vanished from the Penitenciaría del Litoral, in Guayaquil, wearing a soldier’s uniform.
While several members of the military were caught smuggling, abuses grew on the other side of the walls. In a letter sent to from the prison in Esmeraldas, a border province in the north of the country, addressed to this investigation team, an inmate pleaded for help. He said he had witnessed how the military beat the lungs and broke three fingers of one of his cellmates, who had tuberculosis. "Another inmate was taken out the back door because he had a cell phone on him that had been procured by a military," he wrote.
A released inmate who served his time in the same prison where the military officer worked, said that he was soldiers tortured him with electric shocks, more than once, to obtain information about drug stashes. Malnourished, with his skin stuck to his bones, he said he was beaten when he demanded food to eat. "I rebelled against them. It was preferable to get shot, but no, they did it this way, slowly," he said.
The identity of the released man is being withheld to protect his safety and integrity. Tierra de Nadie Investigation Unit and CONNECTAS.
Militarization of prisons promised to bring down criminality rates in the penitentiary system, which has been hard to control due to the leadership of criminal gangs that have caused hundreds of deaths over the years: 680 inmates were brutally killed in 17 prison massacres between 2018 and 2023.
But the accomplishment of this goal is in question: 455 inmates died in prisons between January 2024 and April 2025, reveals a report of the Ombudsman's Office, to which this team had access, citing data provided by Ecuador's prison authority. However, in no case was the cause of death specified, according to the document. It is also unknown if the murders of 17 prisoners in the November 2024 massacre at the militarized Penitenciaría del Litoral in Guayaquil are included in this balance.
For the Ombudsman's Office, the 455 deaths are a symptom of failure: "The State has not been able to reduce deaths inside prisons, the numbers reached are now similar to the years of prison massacres." The institution concludes that, regardless of the causes, "they are considered potentially unlawful deaths".
Disappearing in the Name of War
Torture crossed the threshold of prisons. Since the internal war began in Ecuador, there is a common factor among the cases of alleged arbitrary detentions and forced disappearances committed by the military in the streets: the use of torture as a method to obtain information.
On September 3, 2024, Sebastián* and his cousin José*, aged 17 and 16, were detained by soldiers who broke into José's house at four o'clock in the morning in Babahoyo, a canton in the province of Los Ríos, the place with the largest number of reports of forced disappearances.
Fourteen days later, on September 17, Sebastián appeared and told the police that they were taken to the Fire Department of Montalvo, a neighboring canton, to be locked in different rooms, where more people were being held.
Sebastian said that, for several nights, the military would take the detained youths, including Jose, out at night to give information about weapons or drug stashes. He said that on September 10, the soldiers put him, his cousin and another man in a pickup truck on their way to a rural area where the soldiers beat them and threatened to kill them if they did not give up information. He begged not to be killed.
A few minutes later, he heard two gunshots. He never saw his cousin José or the other man again. Sebastian said that days later he gave information to the military, and they left him in a rural parish.
But his return was short-lived. After telling what happened to him and his cousin, the military arrested him again on November 28. Since then, there has been no trace of their whereabouts. Dozens of victims and families share their stories still searching for their children during the armed conflict.
While abuses multiply, the government issued an Organic Law of National Solidarity in June 2025, which opened the door to warrantless raids and pardons with deferred effect for men in uniform prosecuted for crimes related to the internal armed conflict at any stage prior to sentencing. Crimes including extrajudicial executions and excessive use of force.
Off-Protocol Shots
Even in a war there are rules.
Two confidential documents, obtained by Tierra de Nadie and CONNECTAS, explain the two types of rules and regulations that soldiers must follow, depending on the type of mission they perform.
On the one hand, there are the rules of engagement: a set of 48 rules that regulate the use of force when soldiers carry out operations or combat against armed groups and military objectives during the internal armed conflict. In this protocol, lethal force may be applied exclusively against identified individuals and military objectives that pose an imminent threat.
On the other hand, in routine operations (such as patrols or street controls) soldiers must abide by another set of rules, called standards of behavior, which includes 56 provisions. In such cases, force is not an immediate option: it can only be used as a last resort, after attempting to calm the situation and issuing a clear warning.
Both guidelines, explains Luis Altamirano, former Army commander, are in force during the internal war and must be included in the soldiers' operational orders.
The two sets of instructions also share similar rules, depending on the mission. One of the most important: distinction. In combat, soldiers must differentiate between civilians and military targets, while, outside of combat, they must differentiate aggressors from civilians. And another, even clearer: arbitrariness and abuses are forbidden both for civilians and for people who represent threats.
However, the military attack that killed Johan Magno, a teenage basketball player, failed to fulfill both.
The soldiers shot him from behind, straight in the head.
CRACK, CRACK! sounded the shots of military rifles, like cold whips that split in two the night of celebration of March 2, 2025, in Puerto El Carmen, a town in the Amazon province of Sucumbíos, in the middle of the carnival holiday.
The white motorcycle, with black seat, skidded at ten thirty. Three teenagers were riding it: Johan Magno, 16; his older brother, Kevin, 19; and his friend Carlos*, 16, the driver. The three, who became friends coaching basketball, were returning to the town's central park, where their family and hundreds of neighbors were celebrating, two blocks away, the election of the carnival queen.
But the bullets hit them, and the party was over in seconds.
First Kevin collapsed, taking a bullet to the head. A few meters later, while trying to reach the town's Navy Captaincy, Carlos and Johan were hit by a shot to the skull.
Thirty-nine hours after the attack, Johan died due to a cerebral hemorrhage, his autopsy revealed, caused by the gunshot to his head at 1:30 PM on March 4. Kevin remained in an intensive care unit for three months while neurological damage to his head was treated, and Carlos* was the only one left without serious injuries.
One day after the attack, on March 3, the people of Puerto El Carmen came together in peaceful protest. Relatives and neighbors showed photographs of Johan, a teenager with a dark complexion and curly hair, and walked to the military battalion facilities to demand explanations, The colonel in charge responded: "I ask you to remain calm. We, as part of this canton, express our solidarity and are ready for any investigation carried out by the competent authorities. The battalion has nothing to hide," he promised.
The people insisted: Why did they shoot three unarmed friends, with no links to criminal groups?
The friends were riding a motorcycle that a nearby neighbor had lent them, unaware that an hour earlier, at 9:30 p.m., alleged members of Comandos de Frontera, an irregular Colombian armed group, had opened fire from the Putumayo River on the installations of the Army's Jungle Battalion No. 55 Putumayo, two kilometers from the central park. They wanted to recover a shipment of 130 tanks of fuel seized two days earlier.
Three vehicles (a police patrol car, a white military van, and a black van) left the battalion with armed military and police personnel to patrol the perimeter of the facilities.
Embarked on the motorcycle, the three friends took a street leading to the park, when they were intercepted by the lights of a black military van, as confirmed by this team through confidential sources. They got scared and tried to turn around towards the Captaincy of Puerto El Carmen, owned by the Armed Forces.
Kevin Magno, still with severe injuries to his skull and having lost his left eye, agreed to provide testimony for this investigation.
"I only saw a white light. I remember that they pointed the lights at us. Someone said: “Stop!” I heard a shot, and I fell. Then I heard another one and saw my brother, who was holding on to the seat, fall," he recalls. Kevin says he did not know it was the military talking to them. "I thought they were police officers. I think Luis turned because he didn't want them to take his motorcycle, which belonged to our neighbor," he recalls.
A video, to which this team had access, shows Kevin trembling, lying on the cement, his face covered in blood from the impact of the gunshot. In the images, Kevin has a lollipop in his mouth, which he was having when they were out for a walk: "I tried to make myself throw up with the lollipop. Someone said: this one is alive and then the people piled up". He does not remember anything else.
Two empty cartridge cases and a 5.56 caliber cartridge were found at the scene of the attack, the same ammunition used by the military during that weekend.
Johan's death, investigated as an abuse in service enforcement, is proof of the violation of several standards of behavior that the military should have followed. Even though the soldiers wanted to catch members of an armed group, Johan, Kevin and Carlos were not targets. They failed to distinguish between civilians and targets, as established by their internal protocols.
The Armed Forces have not justified the attack. The standards of behavior prohibit the use of lethal force without an imminent threat to life. There is no record that the three teenagers were armed.
A mid-ranking military officer claims that stories like Johan's have prompted officers like him to travel to various areas to make recommendations to soldiers involved in operations. "One of them being that they refrain from persecutions. It has been known to happen that people would suddenly elude military checkpoints out of nervousness and would be chased, shot at, and killed. Consequently, persecution is now prohibited." But his recommendation, he says, was not well received. "They would say to me in frustration, 'What do we do then? Who do we obey?'”
Protocols also require that, in the event that the progressive use of force is necessary, military units must record their actions in photographs, videos, or other media. However, there is no indication that such documentation exists.
Cases like Johan's should be investigated internally in depth, says former Army Commander Luis Altamirano. "These acts, logically, are outside any norm. If we say that there is training in human rights, in procedures, that there are levels of supervision, well, something has gone wrong and it is a higher obligation," he questions.
This team requested data and interviews with the Ministry of Defense and the Joint Command of the Armed Forces on the disciplinary processes carried out by the institution. There was no response.
General Alexander Levoyer, who was the head of operations of the Armed Forces during the internal armed conflict, says that the military respects human rights. While internal protocols are clear, he acknowledges that, already on operations, "there is a very tenuous line in moving from theory to practice for a second lieutenant, a captain or a major [officers]. It is very delicate. You have to wait until you are shot before you can respond." He says there is a risk of "bad procedures" in that line.
For Luis Córdova, understanding the ethos is key to get to the bottom of the abuses. He outlines one of its main elements: the "hypermasculinization" of soldiers, which molds them under an ideal of toughness and devalues those they perceive as weak. Thus, he explains, the military practices that forge that ethos seek maximum emotional inhibition to make the soldier an individual incapable of showing empathy towards people who are likely "enemies".
There is a psychological context in the military culture, says Córdova.
"You're putting your life on the line. In other words: it's your life or the lives of others".
Ecuador's Children Are Disappearing in Its Internal War
It was a swift detention. It lasted barely three minutes.
Dave Robin Loor and Juan Daniel Santillán, two bricklayers, aged 20 and 27, were going to buy empanadas on Jimmy Izquierdo street, one of the most commercial streets in Ventanas, in the province of Los Ríos, when a white van intercepted them at 4:33 p.m. on August 26, 2024.
Five soldiers, concealing their identity with black ski masks, frisked the young men, who did not resist and handed over their cell phones, as seen in two videos that show the arrest from different angles and to which this team had access. Both were loaded into the back of the pickup truck and taken to streets near Dave Loor's home. The images show that the soldiers frisked them from head to toe, feeling every part of their bodies, without finding any weapons.
Record of the moment Dave Loor and Juan Daniel Santillán were apprehended by the military on August 26, 2024, in the Ventanas canton, Los Ríos province (Ecuador). Tierra de Nadie & CONNECTAS Investigation Unit.
Alerted by her brother, Lucía*, Dave's mother, who is now part of the Attorney General's Office Witness Protection Program, ran to Quito and Héctor Cabrera streets, an intersection that is 250 meters from the road where the youths were arrested. There, she saw his son face down, lying in the back of the military truck.
"I tried to approach the soldiers to ask them what was going on, when one of them hit me in the leg with his rifle and told me: 'go, go,' while the neighbors watched," Lucía recalls. Over the next few hours, she and her husband searched for Dave in several rural areas. They arrived at an area called Carlos Carriel, where there are water canals.
"People were shocked because they saw the military vans coming. But nobody wanted to talk, until a lady told us that they had passed that way.” Following the road, Lucía found a naked young man, whom she had seen hours earlier in the back of another truck when she was prevented from seeing her son. The young man told the police that he had been tortured, that soldiers threatened to kill him if they found photos linking him to a criminal gang. He also claimed that after he was released, he saw the soldiers take Dave and other young men away.
When she arrived home at night, Lucía found her house in disarray. "My neighbors said that the military broke into my house. I managed to record everything: they took my laptop, shoes, Dave's hats and money. I didn't imagine that they had taken my son to the house," Lucía claims.
The only official version of this disappearance, investigated as a case of forced disappearance by the Attorney General's Office, was given by a military officer in charge of operations in Ventanas, who assured that he could not give a "value judgment and determine if the assailants are military personnel from other units or if they are civilians dressed as military personnel."
However, an official document from the Army's Special Forces Group No. 25 South Base, to which this team had access, confirmed that the two young men were indeed held by the military. The soldiers were led by Captain Roger Robalino, a member of an elite unit that was not authorized to conduct control operations in Ventanas, but in neighboring cantons, according to the report.
Captain Robalino, who works in a mega-jail, admitted in the report that he and his colleagues stopped the two young men because they thought theirs was one of three suspicious motorcycles following an alert from a man who reported his vehicle stolen. He said that they evaded a military checkpoint, and that Dave Loor had even identified himself as part of a criminal gang called Los Pájaros Locos, dedicated to stealing cars and then extorting their owners. At 6:30 p.m., they were allegedly released in a neighborhood known as Las Malvinas for lack of evidence, according to the document.
Internal military protocols establish that the detention of a person is permitted only when he or she is discovered in a flagrant criminal act, not on suspicion, as what happened to the friends. Nor were they brought to an authority, as required by the Ecuadorian Criminal Code. The rules also prohibit arbitrariness and abuses, such as the torture reported by the young man Lucía found when she was looking for her son. He also said he last saw Dave Loor in the back of the military truck.
Eight months later, on April 3, 2025, Captain Robalino was scheduled to give his version of the disappearance of the young men to the Attorney General's Office. He decided to remain silent.
Diana Roca, aunt of Dave Loor Roca, disappeared on August 26, 2024, after being detained by a military patrol in the Ventanas canton, in the coastal province of Los Ríos. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
Rocío García (left), mother of Fabricio Alvarado, who disappeared on December 6, 2024, after being detained in Los Ríos province. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
Narcisa Solís (right), mother of Jorge Luis Izquierdo, who disappeared on December 4, 2024, after being apprehended by the military in Los Ríos province. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
Jenyfer Vera, Azucena Bravo, and Johanna Adrihan, niece, mother, and sister of brothers Óscar and Jonathan Adrihan, respectively, and friends of Cristian Sandoya, who disappeared on November 24, 2024, after their arrest in the city of Babahoyo, in the coastal province of Los Ríos. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
Annia Pisco, María Arteaga, and Sandra Arteaga, sister, relative, and mother of Kleiner and Manolo Pisco, who disappeared on December 6, 2024, after being apprehended by soldiers at the La Fortaleza ranch in the Simón Bolívar canton of Guayas province. Annia is the partner of Miguel Morán, who also disappeared along with the teenagers. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
Luis Arroyo and Kathy Bustos, parents of Ismael and Josué Arroyo, teenagers who were murdered after being apprehended by soldiers on December 8, 2024, in southern Guayaquil, in the coastal province of Guayas. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
Dennis Álava (right), Justin Valverde's mother, and relatives of the 20-year-old man who disappeared on November 25, 2024. He and his friend Jeampier Castañeda were apprehended by soldiers in the area known as Mata de Cacao, in the province of Los Ríos, as they were heading to a pharmacy. Neither has returned. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
Lissette Santillán, sister of Juan Daniel Santillán, who disappeared on August 26, 2024, after being detained by a military patrol in the Ventanas canton, in the coastal province of Los Ríos. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
Members of the Association of Relatives and Friends of Disappeared Persons in Ecuador (Asfadec) and the Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees hold photos of their relatives at a protest outside Carondelet Palace, the presidential headquarters, in Quito, on May 9, 2025. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
Liz Villón, Jonathan Villón's sister, and her mother. Jonathan, a father of three, has been missing since December 9, 2024. He was apprehended by soldiers traveling in a municipal van in Guayaquil. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
María Fernanda Restrepo (left) holds a canvas with the faces of her brothers Santiago and Andrés Restrepo Arismendi, who disappeared by the Ecuadorian police on January 8, 1988, in one of the emblematic cases of forced disappearance in Ecuador in the 20th century, next to the portraits of Steven Medina, Nehemías Arboleda, and Josué and Ismael Arroyo, who disappeared on December 8, 2024, in Guayaquil in the coastal province of Guayas. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
Ruth R., Nelly T., and Xiomara M., relatives of Dalton Ruiz, who disappeared after being apprehended by the military on December 8, 2024, in Guayaquil, in the coastal province of Guayas. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
Ronny Medina, father of Steven Medina, a child who was murdered after being arrested by soldiers on December 8, 2024, in Guayaquil, in the coastal province of Guayas. Photograph: Ramiro Aguilar for CONNECTAS.
For one of the investigating agents who has followed this case (and others on the Ecuadorian coast) military actions such as that of Captain Robalino show that soldiers are profiling "alleged criminals based on their physical appearance" and that, through torture, they are trying to obtain information. But this is not legal intelligence work, objects the agent, who defines it as "an improvisation that applies the criminal law of the enemy --which is prohibited."
The investigating officer reviews one of the most serious cases he has known, and which is part of those analyzed for this investigation: the disappearance of brothers Manolo and Kleiner Pisco, aged 17 and 15, respectively, their brother-in-law Miguel Morán, aged 21, and Bryan Torres, aged 16, on December 6, 2024. No one has been able to determine their whereabouts since a group of soldiers took them away after breaking into the Hacienda La Fortaleza, in a rural area of Milagro, in the province of Guayas.
Manolo and Kleiner, both students, and Miguel, a farmer, had arrived at the Hacienda (on the recommendation of a friend of their father) on November 30. Annia Pisco, their older sister and Miguel's partner, says that the three of them were going to work as loaders during the December vacation break.
It is still unclear what the motive for the military incursion was. Workers at the Hacienda said they were beaten and locked in rooms by eight to ten soldiers who broke in looking for weapons. At seven o'clock in the morning, they came out of the rooms when they noticed that the soldiers had left with the teenagers. Employees found the surveillance cameras damaged; the windows of some doors and several padlocks were broken. A police report, to which Tierra de Nadie and CONNECTAS had access, presented the images showing the damage.
But the investigating officer sheds a light of evidence. Following a raid on a camera monitoring center of the canton's mayor's office, a series of videos and photographs from the day of the disappearance were analyzed that "show military personnel leaving [the Hacienda] apparently with bloody sheets over what appear to be bodies."
The family of Manolo, Kleiner, and Miguel are still looking for them alive.
This team also accessed a video that reveals the last images of Fardi Muñoz, 19, and Bruno Rodríguez, a 23-year-old with intellectual disabilities, before they disappeared being detained by the military in the city of Esmeraldas, on January 30, 2024.
Last images of Bruno Rodríguez and Fardi Muñoz before their disappearance following a military attack on January 30, 2024, in the city of Esmeraldas, Esmeraldas Province, Ecuador. Tierra de Nadie Investigation Unit and CONNECTAS.
The images show how two soldiers point their guns at the young men, huddled and crouching. A soldier shoots one of them directly in the leg, who writhes in pain. It happened during the first month of the internal war, while Fardi and Bruno were going to a store, according to the CDH, a social organization that has documented state abuses in the context of the armed conflict.
This video is the main evidence that the families of Bruno and Fardi have,. They have searched for them in the prisons and cemeteries of Esmeraldas. Without a trace of what the military did with them, they are still waiting for the Attorney General's Office to move forward in the investigation of their disappearance.
The Government of Daniel Noboa has not provided answers on any of these stories. There is also no official statement from his administration. But the silence is broken by claims of hundreds of families who, without their loved ones by their side, fill the streets with demands. They are looking for their missing children in an internal war that, according to the military's own voices, has no strategy and is aimless.
*Names not disclosed to guarantee the integrity of the people who gave testimony to this investigation.
