Ecuador was once a safe country with some of the best economic prospects in the region.
Today, Ecuador has a nearly 500% increase in violent crimes and a marginalized population of poor, African, and indigenous people who find themselves the targets in a war in the South American country.
As Ecuador heads into a very important run-off election on April 13, the issue of security and state violence, as well as the economy, remains at the forefront for many Ecuadorians. In January 2025 alone, over 750 homicides were registered in Ecuador. Economic dollarization and submission to U.S. dictates the proliferation of arms shipments through privately owned ports, and the expansion of international drug cartels to enforce an atmosphere of violence and a military presence to combat them have all combined to make the living conditions of the poorest and vulnerable unbearable, especially for African and Indigenous communities with a constant war directed at them from the militarized structures of the state. Cases like that of the Guayaquil Four tragically show the fatal consequences for those at the receiving end of a deadly war against the people.
Black Agenda Report contributor Clau O’Brien Moscoso interviewed Grayzone correspondent and documentary filmmaker Oscar León on January 6, 2025, less than a month after the disappearance and later confirmed death of the four Afro-Ecuadorian boys in Guayaquil at the hands of sixteen Air Force members. Below is Part 1 of the interview.
Clau O’Brien Moscoso: Let’s start with the case of the four young AfroEcuadorian boys leaving a football match who went missing in Guayaquil. This is almost a month later. We now know they weren’t just disappeared, but tortured and killed. The Daniel Noboa government seems to be implicated with these sixteen Air Force personnel.
Can you give us context? What is the Noboa government’s security plan? What is the role of the US with this militarization? Noboa gave up the Galapagos Islands and is trying to change the constitution to allow for foreign bases. How does Ecuador go from one of the safest countries in the region to what is happening now?
Oscar Leon: The deaths of Ismael, Nehemiah, Josue and Stephen – is a direct product of these policies that have been applied ever since the end of the Rafael Correa government. That administration was the representative of social programs and had a tone that was more people-friendly, worker-friendly, even though it was not perfect by any means.
The focus had changed so drastically after that because of Lenin Moreno, who was Correa’s successor. He won, using Correa’s party, using his supposed policies, using his memory of what 10 years of government had been and won big because people wanted to stay on that road of social investment for a better life for Ecuadorians, but unfortunately, the Moreno administration operated under an extreme form of neoliberalism, despite being elected with pro social promises. He did the complete opposite.
Almost eight years after not investing in the Ecuadorian state, it is near collapse in each and every way from the Presidency on down, everywhere. Wherever you look, there’s been eight years of not funding or taking money away from institutions; some form of defunding or destruction of certain government institutions. What was a strong healthcare plan, for example, before Moreno has turned into a system where now there’s no aspirin. If you need an aspirin, and you go to the government site or clinic, that same government will send you somewhere else. I have a friend who had a daughter who had to have heart surgery. The Government sent her to Colombia, funded her. The doctors paid for the whole operation, paid for the trip of her food, for her to stay. So that’s the same government that fast forward 8 years later, that same friend goes to the hospital and there’s not even an aspirin; and I say that because I went with her, and I had to buy the aspirins for my friend’s daughter. So it’s critical. The state of the funding, the state of fragmentation and fracture that the Ecuadorian state has is critical.
How does that translate to the death of these four kids in one of the most damaged institutions of “justice” and the police? The judges were changed in a political process to get rid of those that Correa had put in place and in that change many say that it was fractured fundamentally, and the courts never recovered from that. Because in that change some appointed judges were not as prepared, and others were more like political appointments that were not necessarily prepared or wanted to do the right thing. They did whatever was convenient for that party. And so this hunt for leftists that’s been in place from the government on down means that a lot of good functionaries are gone, a lot of the state built up by the Correa government has been eroded.
There’s newspaper after newspaper articles where you can find stories of judges that actually were paid straight out or were intimidated. As leader of the Medellín Cartel, Pablo Escobar used to say, “You get the silver or you get the lead”, meaning when narcos tell you to do something, they’re going to pay you money that you otherwise will never get and if you say no, they’re going to come and kill you. What happened in Ecuador is that the government was heavily defunded and the Sinaloa Cartel and others have come into Ecuador, balkanized it and filled up that emptiness or institutions that have been intentionally defunded.
The void of power that had been left by the state, its absence – the cartels filled up that void of power. So now the cartels have people in the ministries, from the last administration. To these organizations crime organizations, like the Balkan mafia, the Sinaloa Cartel which are not limiting themselves to export cocaine to only Europe and the United States, but now they profit from the corruption in the state. And this is important – they also steal kids and sell them somewhere in the world. So because the port of Guayaquil that’s at the center of all of these is poorly administered and guarded. It’s a million containers a day, and there’s only like 10 people checking. Doubts have been raised about the way that port is controlled. Some say it’s controlled by the mafia.
So that’s where these four kids get kidnapped together because they live in Ecuador – in a climate where children disappear week after week. I’m serious, if you look at Facebook, you see the pictures. You’ll see posts, like “My daughter disappeared” and it’s especially girls. And this is a serial network of kidnapping and selling girls. That’s what the Sinaloa Cartel is famous for, if it’s true. A big part of their profit is the kidnapping and sale of children, teenagers and women especially so it is in that context that this happened. Ecuador was already about to fall apart when Correa took power, but the Lenin Moreno administration basically destroyed Ecuador and allowed it to be co-opted by the cartels, especially Sinaloa.
That’s the climate that Noboa wins by promising a strong hand against crime. But the results of that fight present more questions than answers. Meaning, what’s the alliance that you can find between the state and the cartels? Let me remind you that in Mexico, where there was a similar process.I can’t remember the exact name, but he was something else. He was the Tsar against drugs, and he was the one who was working for a specific cartel and the militaries also were found to be on the payroll. This is something I report on in a documentary I made a year ago when this whole thing started. We forecasted, one of our guests said, “What you’re doing here right now is just replacing who is administering all this.” The narcos are now used to buying the police and the judges and you militarize the situation. Now the narcos, all they have to do is pay the military, and it’s going to be even more effective and certain that orders given are carried out.
But this is the context in which those four kids disappear, a context in which there’s a war against “crime” supposedly. But is it true? It looks more like a war on the poor. Because a lot of that crime implies a lot of money, but you don’t see the war in the circles where there’s a lot of money. If you see the war against the poor, the military goes to specific towns and wages war against supposed crime, but in reality they disappear kids.
There was a child named Dave Lohr, he disappeared about some months ago. Similar case, the military came, picked him up, and they never brought him back. And this case presents more questions, because, you see, what happened is that the military picked up these kids in the street and were heading to the military barracks. And this is where it gets cloudy. Some say that they went to the military barracks. Others say that they dropped them off before entering the truck in the military barracks. So the state is trying to say no, we have nothing to do with that because they supposedly dropped them off. If you tell me tomorrow that the military in the United States took some kids and then abandoned them in a really really dangerous neighborhood, naked at 1am, that there’s not going to be a response from the state? There’s nothing that justifies that.
But that is a bit of a dangerous neighborhood. At that point three motorcycles came with guys with military cuts and they kidnapped and disappeared the kids. Those are the ones who took them never to see them again. The thing is like when you look at the videos from the military barracks, you see the patrol that goes in after a little while three military guys in motorcycles come out and drive off, which is exactly the description of the ones who disappeared the boys.
There’s a bunch of questions there. It’s very possible that these three military members are part of that network I mentioned earlier of stealing children and selling them for the Sinaloa Cartel, because otherwise how are they detaining the kids? They have to take them by law to the barracks, put in a report and take them to a certain police officer.
But that didn’t happen. They were abandoned naked in the middle of somewhere, and then they took their motorcycles and went back out to get them and disappeared these boys. So there’s no real way that the Ecuadorian Government can escape this because it’s a state crime. It’s just a matter of at which level there’s a responsibility that they accept. But it’s clear that this is not just horrible, and the worst thing that we feared happened. But it’s also clear now that it’s not the first time.