Court finds 16 soldiers guilty for the disappearance of four Guayaquil boys in December 2024

An Ecuadorian court on Monday sentenced eleven soldiers to 34 years and eight months in prison for the forced disappearance of four boys who were illegally detained in December 2024 in Guayaquil. The boys’ bullet-riddled bodies were found burned a week later.

Parents of one of the murdered Guayaquil boys protesting the delay of the trial last week.

Five other soldiers who cooperated with prosecutors were given 30-month prison sentences while a lieutenant colonel who was prosecuted as an accomplice was acquitted.

In addition to the prison sentences, the guilty soldiers were ordered to pay $376,000 in financial compensation to the families of the minors. Judge Jovanny Suárez also ordered that they make a public apology to be published and broadcast in the largest national media.

In his comments, Suárez said the boys’ disappearance and murders was “an egregious human rights violation” that came after President Daniel Noboa declared the country in “internal armed conflict.” The judge blamed lack of proper training and a military culture that promoted an “iron fist” approach to its duties of assisting police.

The verdicts came more than a year after Ismael and Josué Arroyo, 15 and 14, and Saúl Arboleda, 15, and Steven Medina, 11, were picked up by an army patrol outside a shopping center in south Guayaquil in 2024. The four were accused of “stealing” but the claim was never proven.

Instead of handing the boys over to the National Police as protocol required, the soldiers took them to Taura, a town 40 kilometers west of Guayaquil, near an Air Force base. The boys were stripped naked, beaten and abandoned. The soldiers denied committing the murders.

Prosecutor Christian Fárez, said during the trial that the soldiers exposed the children to a “high risk” by leaving them in a “danger zone” and that their murders could have been prevented had they not been abandoned.

The charred remains of the boys were found several days later in a nearby mangrove swamp and the autopsies determined they were shot multiple times before being set on fire.

Judge Suárez accepted prosecutors’ evidence that the minors were subjected to cruel treatment and that they experienced moments of “horror” during physical torture administered by the soldiers.

The testimony of the cooperating soldiers was key to the convictions, as they told how several of their companions harassed, insulted and beat the boys. One of the cooperating witnesses turned over a video of the torture in which a soldier tells one of the boys that he should be thankful for not being shot.

Following the sentence, family and friends of the boys said that justice had “been partially done” but that the murders remain to be prosecuted. Prosecutors said that the investigation is continuing.