Luis Sarmiento went out early one March morning to go buy bread with his grandson, in his hometown of Duran, in Ecuadorwhen in front of him, on the street, he saw two beheaded corpseswith their hands tied to a pole.
Reflexively, he turned and secured the eyes of the child, who nevertheless understood the macabre message of drug-trafficking gangs.
“I covered my grandson’s eyes, took him back home, closed the shutters and I do not know anything else,” said the 78-year-old retired worker, who has lived in the poor Cerro Las Cavras neighborhood of Duran, Duran, a city of 200,000. not far from the port of Guayaquil (west).
Drug trafficking gangrene has infected the neighborhoodbuilt on a hill that has been turned into a “nursery for assassins”, a former senior police officer will tell the French Agency, provided he is not named.
The gangs recruit children from the age of ten, initially as drug dealers. “First they sell, then they give them a gun and they become paid killers,” confirms Duran police chief Jorge Hadati.
Authorities seized several fluffy crocodiles at a hideout of one of Duran’s gangs, the Los largartos (The Lizards) gang. Police believe that in order to get acquainted and later to attract children, the gangs give them toys.
Of the 230 criminals arrested in Duran from January to April 2022, the vast majority were minors or had just reached adulthood. “And they had already committed four or five murders,” according to police chief Hadati.
In Cerro Las Cavras, violence is now endemic.
In February, two bodies were found hanging from a footbridge. As of October 2021, about ten corpses, mutilated, hanged or released, have been left in plain sight, certifying accounts cleared by the barbaric method of Mexican drug cartels.
The killings are part of an undeclared war on rival gangs to control trafficking, which, according to official figures, could generate up to $ 1.8 million a month in Duran alone.
Since January, 363 people have been killed in Duran and the neighboring towns of Samporodon and Guayaquil – the latter being the country’s largest port, a cocaine smuggling hub to Europe and the US – in crimes believed to be linked to trafficking.
“Super Market”
On the slopes of Cerro Las Cavra, some thirty police officers check cars for weapons or drugs. In the neighborhood, equestrian police officers stop a man for a physical examination.
Locals watch the businesses looking sideways, without leaving their homes, nor catching a conversation. The law of silence reigns.
It is a “drug supermarket”, according to police chief Hadati. “Families live from the sale or take money from the mafias and the rest are silent because they are afraid.”
During their latest raid on Cerro Las Cavras, police backed the army, which was deployed internally as part of a state of emergency declared by the government of Conservative President Guillermo Lasso in three provinces, including Waia, where Duran, to tackle organized crime.
“The gangs are playing cat and mouse with us,” said NCO Washington Regges. They have provided children with “lighter-sized” walkie-talkies in order to warn them about the authorities’ operations.
The leaders of the dreaded “Los Tsoneros” gang come from Cerro Las Cavras. Junior Roldan and Ben 10 both started their criminal activities like paid pistols, according to the authorities.
The “Los Tsoneros” gang has been repeatedly involved in the barbaric incidents that have been raging in the country’s prisons since last year.
Last Monday, 44 detainees were killed in Belavista prison in the province of Santo Domingo de los Tsatsilas, 80 kilometers west of the capital Quito, when two gangs decided to clear their accounts.
As of February 2021, some 400 detainees have been killed in clashes, often involving prison control.
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