Anxiety is increasing in Ecuadorafter the discovery of four charred bodies near a military base, amid fruitless searches to locate four minor boys who had gone to play and disappeared on December 8, during a military operation in the western part of the country.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) expressed “concern” over the disappearance of the four children, aged between 11 and 15.

For their part, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and UNICEF demanded that Ecuador “exhaust all the mechanisms at its disposal to investigate the facts” in a “thorough, swift and impartial” manner.

Saul Arboleda, Steven Medina and brothers Jose and Ismael Arroyo had gone to play soccer south of Guayaquil in the southwestern part of the country on December 8.

They never came back.

Luis Arroyo, the father of the two brothers, revealed to the media that on the night his children disappeared, he received a call from someone who gave him Ishmael. Soldiers “chased us, blew us up, beat us,” the child told the father.

The Arroyo family says they were then sent two addresses via WhatsApp – one, in the town of Taura, corresponding to a military base. Then, during another telephone conversation, someone suggested to him that the children were “taken by the mafia”.

On Tuesday, after the justice ruled that this case was an “enforced disappearance”, four bodies were found in a marshy area, near the military base in Taura, according to media.

In unverified video released by parliament, soldiers are seen driving one of the teenagers into a vehicle and beating him, while another boy is lying face down in front of the car.

The bodies found are completely “decomposed,” which likely makes them extremely difficult to identify, Billy Navarrete, executive director of the Guayaquil Commission for the Defense of Human Rights, which supports the parents of the missing teenagers, warned reporters.

The families were asked to report to the Guayaquil mortuary on Christmas Day.

If they fail to identify the remains – as is expected – authorities hope to be able to do DNA tests, which generally require 30 to 40 days to allow conclusions to be drawn.

On Monday, the prosecutor’s office searched the military base in Taura, near Guayaquil, where soldiers who participated in the military operation are located. Suspects’ phones and the vehicles believed to have been used to transport the teenagers were seized.

The Ministry of Defense announced that 16 men of the Air Force have been taken into the custody of the Aeronautics Department.

“Nothing these children may have done justifies their disappearance,” Defense Minister Giancarlo Loffredo said yesterday.

The minister, however, warned at the same time against any “attempt to make the citizens of Ecuador believe that the soldiers are some kind of bad guys who go out at sixteen and hang out in soccer fields looking to kidnap and disappear minors.”

The case is shocking public opinion in Ecuador, where NGOs complain that human rights violations are multiplying.

President Daniel Noboa has repeatedly declared states of emergency, sending the army into the streets to deal with powerful gangs because of the wave of violence sweeping Ecuador, once an oasis of peace and tranquility in Latin America.

Although he initially appeared to question whether the case of the four teenagers was indeed an “enforced disappearance”, President Noboa now says the boys may be declared “national heroes”.