A child looks through the bars at a soldier stationed on the street, in Guayaquil, Ecuador.Martin Mejia (AP)
Every time you hear shootings, almost in any neighborhood in Guayaquil, the first instinct is to run to save the children.
Hide in the room farthest from the front door, windows, under the bed, or lay the mattress on top of the children.
There is no sufficient shield to protect them.
It is not enough to prohibit them from going to school after each episode of violence, because they are murdered while they sleep, in their home, with the windows and doors closed, like Valentina, Bryanna, Adiel, Aitana, Maité, Alexander... In the arms of their parents, or having an ice cream.
Violence in Ecuador severely affects children, at least two minors were murdered every day in 2023, according to the Ministry of the Interior.
The previous year closed with the shocking number of 770 homicides of children from birth to 19 years old, as the Ecuadorian Police classifies the data.
The figure represents an increase of 640% compared to the 104 that were registered in 2019, Unicef warns.
Most of the homicides were carried out with firearms and the victims were mainly two groups: from newborn babies to four years of age;
and adolescents between 15 and 19 years old, who are recruited by criminal gangs.
They use minors to put them on the front line of this war to extort, murder, sell drugs and recruit other children, the Police have said.
“When we see this terrifying figure of 770 homicides, we realize that for four years here, children have put their bodies to violence,” says Sybel Martínez, of the Alliance for the Rights of Children and Adolescents, “and there I question it, because the protection of children is only exclusively for adults.
We talk about the State, society and family and we have all failed them,” she adds.
“This occurs in an evolution of the increase in crime in Ecuador and is worrying in a country where childhood already presented and presents multiple challenges,” explains Luz Ángela Melo, representative of the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, in Ecuador. .
Keeping children alive is not the only challenge of the State that has extended care to 4.5 million infants.
Ecuador is the third country in the region with the highest rate of chronic malnutrition, which means that one in five children under two years of age is not well nourished, does not reach their height or weight, which triggers diseases that prevent its development.
37% of children under five years of age consume water contaminated with the e-coli bacteria in Ecuador, and the figure increases if the children are in the Amazon.
Added to this is that half of the country's children are physically and psychologically abused, according to the 2018 Health and Nutrition survey, and there is no permanent campaign to stop it.
“Ecuadorian society must stop normalizing violence against children and women, it is an outcry,” says Melo.
Every day six girls between 10 and 14 years old give birth, victims of sexual abuse.
“Not only are they marked with the wound of the trauma of sexual violence, but they are girls who, instead of playing or studying, are breastfeeding,” Melo emphasizes.
And at this moment 244,000 children and adolescents are outside the educational system and no one is doing anything to prevent it.
The Alliance for the Rights of Children and Adolescents and other human rights organizations are closely observing the effects of the declaration of a “state of war” that President Daniel Noboa decreed on January 9, after a wave of attacks in which The capture of a television channel was included.
The operations of the public force have resulted in almost four thousand people detained, among them minors, "who when they are apprehended we have seen that in addition to being humiliated, tortured, no one has thought to say for a while they are children," says Martínez, “and we are not saying that they are not offenders, we are saying that in addition to being offenders they are victims of recruitment, trafficking and of a society and a State that effectively looks at what is happening from a distance without the need to protect and that "The answer we are left with is that we must judge them as adults."
Follow all the information from El PAÍS América on
and
X
, or in our
weekly newsletter
.