The femicide of Letty Cando, raped stabbed and dismembered, puts Ecuador before the mirror of extreme violence

March against gender violence in Quito, Ecuador.

The crime of Letty Cando has aroused the indignation of Ecuadorians. The femicide confessed to raping her, stabbing her three times in the heart, cutting her body into seven pieces and burying her in a swampy area of Guangüiltagua Park, north of Quito, in the early hours of September 3. It is the latest case of gender violence in Ecuador, in a country that accumulates 362 crimes against women so far in 2023. The 33-year-old nurse worked at a hospital south of Quito. Last Wednesday, the social worker of the institution reported her disappearance because she had not gone to work for three days, and Letty "was a very responsible professional and they had not had any communication with her," she described in the complaint, where she left the names of a friend of the victim with whom she had gone out that night.

Letty met Jhonny Caiza that Saturday through other friends at a bar, according to the versions that police investigators have collected. Around midnight her friend felt bad and left the place, but the party continued at the victimizer's house in the Bellavista sector, which borders Guangüiltagua Park, a modest house that is in a ravine. "There are videos from security cameras in which it is seen that Caiza carries Letty to her house, the results of the tests will tell us if she drugged the young woman," explains Galo Muñoz Robalino, deputy director of Investigation of Crimes Against Life, Dinased.

While Letty was unconscious in the confessed killer's room, the rest of the men continued to drink in the street for a few more minutes. Around two in the morning, Caiza went up to his house and an hour later made four trips to Guangüiltagua Park. "On each trip he carried a bundle loaded on his back, it took 22 minutes to go and return, except for the last trip in which he also carried a shovel and it took an hour and a half to return to the house," says Muñoz. That evidence was decisive to have a confession of the man, who when arrested by the police "was cornered and accepted that what he was carrying were the parts of Cando's body," adds the investigator. The detainee said he raped her and then stabbed her three times in the heart and cut her into seven pieces.

The killer gave the exact place where he buried the body of the young nurse who was a native of Loja, a province in southern Ecuador, where her eight-year-old son lives with his grandmother. Investigators found the dismembered body that the 30-year-old locksmith had precisely cut. "I have never seen such a crime, the criminal profile is not common, but it exists. We were amazed at the way he wanted to hide the corpse, the orderly way he buried it," Muñoz says.

The Prosecutor's Office of Ecuador opened an investigation into Johnny Caiza, who is detained for involuntary disappearance resulting in death, but the crime can be reformulated to femicide, which is punishable by 34 years in prison, while more evidence is collected about the murderer, such as the testimony of one of his nieces, who said that he had raped her since she was nine years old. Investigators found other evidence such as Letty's wallet in the house, remains of her burned clothes, but also other pieces of women's clothes from which genetic material will be extracted to know if there are other victims.

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