Guayaquil, Ecuador, (EFE).- Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled on Tuesday that the four Afro-descendant minors, who were detained by military personnel in 2024 and subsequently murdered, were victims of forced disappearance.
The court ordered the state to recognize its responsibility, issue a public apology, and implement other reparative measures.
The high court made the decision after agreeing to an extraordinary protective action filed by the parents of 15-year-old Ismael and 14-year-old Josué Arroyo, who were irregularly arrested on the night of Dec. 8, 2024, along with their friends Saúl Arboleda, 15, and Steven Medina, 11.
The arrest was carried out by two military patrols outside a shopping center in the south of Guayaquil, near Las Malvinas neighborhood where they lived.
The soldiers then transported the minors to Taura, a town about 40 kilometers from Guayaquil and near an Air Force base. There, the soldiers beat and tortured the minors, forced them to undress, and abandoned them.
The minors’ charred remains were found several days later in a nearby mangrove area, and the autopsy confirmed the presence of bullet impacts in at least three of the victims.
On Dec. 22, a criminal court found 16 out of 17 military personnel guilty. Eleven of the soldiers were sentenced to 34 years and eight months in prison; five others received 30-month sentences for cooperating with the investigation; and a lieutenant colonel, who had been charged as an accomplice, was acquitted.
However, in Dec. 2024, a judge accepted a habeas corpus filed by the minors’ families, declaring their forced disappearance and the violation of their rights to life, personal integrity, the best interest of the child, and survival, among others.
The government appealed the decision, and an appeals court revoked it months later, leading the families to turn to the Constitutional Court.
In the ruling published on Tuesday, the judges determined that the judicial authorities violated the right to due process regarding the guarantee of motivación (reasoning/justification), “by failing to comprehensively analyze the alleged detention or respond to the relevant claims raised by the plaintiffs,” thereby nullifying the appeals court’s ruling.
Furthermore, they concluded that “the children were deprived of their liberty illegally, arbitrarily, and unlawfully by military patrols and that the State did not provide immediate, satisfactory, or convincing information about their apprehension or whereabouts”.
The Court recalled that, in contexts of security or states of exception, such as those governing some areas of Ecuador since 2024, when President Daniel Noboa declared an “internal armed conflict” against criminal gangs, “the rights to life and personal integrity cannot be suspended,” and therefore, “the actions of state agents must be carried out with strict respect for the Constitution.”
The judges ordered the Commander of the Air Force to issue a public apology within two months, the Ministry of Education to incorporate a space in the Museum of Memory to highlight this case, the declaration of Dec. 8 as a day in memory of the minors, the implementation of reforms to internal protocols and laws, and the Ministry of Defense to indemnify the parents of each of the minors, among other measures. EFE
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