Forced disappearances, killings and torture: why is Ecuador’s brutal drug war being backed by the west?

The raid began at 4am. As the children slept, soldiers charged into the family home, rifles raised. “They said they were entering under the emergency powers,” says Rosa*, the family’s matriarch, whose name has been changed for fear of retaliation. “They pointed their guns at us. I thought they were going to kill us all.”

The soldiers quickly singled out her son, 16-year-old Jairo Damián Tapia Álvarez, and her nephew, 17-year-old Jostin Elian Álvarez Chávez, she says, separating the boys from the family.

“They said they were taking them in for an ongoing investigation and that, if we resisted, we would all be teargassed,” she says.

For days, the family searched frantically for the boys – at prosecutors’ offices, police stations, hospitals, prisons, fields and even rubbish dumps.

Fifteen days later, Jostin reappeared. Bruised and scared, he said soldiers had tied up him and his cousin in a disused fire station, where they were beaten for information on people and criminal activities they knew nothing about. The soldiers threatened to kill the boys.

Then, a week after they were detained, the boys were driven to a cornfield. Jairo and another detainee were taken from the van; the soldiers carried guns and shovels. Moments later, Jostin heard two gunshots.

“We killed your cousin. Are you sad?”, the soldiers asked him repeatedly in the days afterwards, Jostin said. Eventually, he managed to escape the soldiers and return home, but weeks later, disappeared again. Friends who were with him at the time said the military had taken him.

“We haven’t heard anything since,” Rosa says. “We don’t know where the boys are. All these missing children – where are they?”