On the night of 8 December 2024, four children left a football game in the Las Malvinas neighborhood in the south of Guayaquil, a coastal city in Ecuador. They never made it home. Security footage showed members of the Ecuadorian Air Force detaining them on the street. On Christmas Eve, four charred bodies were found near the Taura River — bound, showing signs of gunshot wounds. They were 11-year-old Steven Medina, 15-year-old Nehemías Arboleda, and brothers Josué and Ismael Arroyo, aged 14 and 15.
Under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance — to which Ecuador is a party — this has a precise legal name: enforced disappearance, followed by extrajudicial execution. And these four children were not alone.
A pattern, not an incident
Between January and December 2024, the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Guayaquil (CDH-GYE) registered 37 cases of people detained and disappeared during military patrols in the coastal provinces of Guayas, Los Ríos and Esmeraldas — seven of them minors. The Prosecutor’s Office has confirmed it is investigating the possible enforced disappearance of at least 43 individuals since President Daniel Noboa took office in 2023. The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances registered 22 urgent actions for Ecuador in a single year — over 20% of all global urgent action requests for that reporting period.
The profile of victims is consistent: young men, mostly Afro-Ecuadorian, from impoverished coastal communities. Cirilo Leonardo Minota Nieves, 35, was taken from a mechanical workshop in Quinindé, Esmeraldas, on 4 April 2024, by at least seven soldiers — the arrest filmed by residents. Dave Robin Loor Roca, 20, was stopped on a motorcycle in Ventanas, Los Ríos, on 26 August 2024; his mother ran to the scene, saw him in the military van, and was pointed at with a weapon. Dalton Oswaldo Ruiz Tapia, 34, was taken from a taxi leaving a popular festivity on 20 October 2024. All three remain missing. In each case, the armed forces have refused to provide operational information to prosecutors, classifying it as “confidential”.
The legal architecture of impunity
Ecuador’s Constitution explicitly prohibits enforced disappearance. The legal framework is not the problem. In January 2024, President Noboa declared a state of emergency and an “internal armed conflict” through Executive Decrees 110 and 111, deploying the military for law enforcement duties under a policy called “Plan Fénix” — whose content is not publicly available. Since then, at least 13 additional executive decrees have suspended constitutional guarantees in different parts of the country.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) has established that military deployment in law enforcement must be exceptional, subordinated to civil authorities, regulated by clear protocols, and subject to independent civilian oversight. Ecuador’s “Plan Fénix” meets none of these criteria. The UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Committee Against Torture have both called on Ecuador to limit military deployment in public security roles. Neither recommendation has been followed. The armed forces have systematically refused to cooperate with prosecutorial investigations, citing the same state of emergency that enables their deployment as justification for withholding information — a legal circular trap that functions as institutional impunity.
The failure to investigate is not accidental
Until December 2025, the specialized prosecutorial unit responsible for investigating human rights violations by security forces had only seven prosecutors for the entire country, and one for the coastal region — where all the disappearances are concentrated. In January 2026, one additional prosecutor was added following sustained pressure from civil society and the international community. Investigation failures are documented across every case: wrong legal classifications, evidence never collected, site inspections conducted months after the disappearance, video footage of detentions left unanalyzed for months in prosecutorial files. Meanwhile, the families have largely been left to conduct their own searches, and some have received threats. On 24 December 2025, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted precautionary measures in favor of 26 disappeared persons and six women searchers, recognizing a serious and irreparable risk to their life and integrity.
One verdict is not justice
On 22 December 2025, the Guayas Criminal Court found 16 members of the military guilty for the enforced disappearance of the four children of Las Malvinas. Eleven received sentences of 34 years and eight months. Five received reduced sentences for cooperating with the investigation. The court also ordered reparations, including a public apology ceremony at the Taura military base and a formal acknowledgment that the Ministry of Defense had spread false information that led to the victims’ stigmatization. The ruling was immediately appealed. When ordered to issue a public apology earlier in the proceedings, the Ministry of Defense used the occasion to deny involvement and threaten the presiding judge.
It is the first time in this crisis that military perpetrators have been sentenced. It is a beginning. But it only applies to four of the 43 documented cases. The whereabouts of Cirilo Minota, Dave Loor, Juan Daniel Santillán, Jostin Álvarez, Jairo Tapia, Dalton Ruiz, and dozens of others remain unknown. One conviction in a climate of systematic obstruction is not justice. It is a data point.
What is at stake
What Ecuador needs is not only a historic verdict in a single case. It needs the full reversal of a militarized security strategy that has produced systematic violations; unconditional cooperation of the armed forces with criminal investigations; a specialized prosecutorial unit with adequate resources; and genuine protection for families who, in the absence of a functioning state, have been doing the state’s job. Until then, the children of Las Malvinas will have a verdict. Most of the others will have nothing but a name on a list.
Ecuador’s security crisis is real. However, the official story being sold to the world is one of security gains: a tough president fighting organized crime, a country reclaiming its streets. The story these families carry is different. It is the story of young men taken in broad daylight, of children chased down on their way home from a football game, of charred bodies found on Christmas Eve, of mothers who have been searching for over a year and still do not know where their sons are.
This is not a story about a security crisis. It is a story about who gets to be disappeared and who gets to be believed. In Ecuador right now, the answer to both questions follows the same line: race, class, and geography. A landmark ruling has been issued. But Plan Fénix continues — and the international community cannot afford to look away.
Daniela Arteaga Molina is an Ecuadorian lawyer specializing in human rights and constitutional law. She holds a Master’s degree in International Relations and Diplomacy from Fairleigh Dickinson University and a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ).
Key Sources
Amnesty International, “It Was the Military. I Saw Them,” AMR 28/0258/2025, September 2025. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr28/0258/2025/en/
Amnesty International, Submissions to the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances, June 2025 https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr28/9493/2025/en/ and January 2026 https://www.amnesty.org/es/documents/amr28/0609/2026/en/.
CDH-GYE, “Reporte de Desapariciones Forzadas en Ecuador,” January 2025. https://www.cdh.org.ec/informes/653-reporte-de-desapariciones-forzadas-en-el-ecuador-31-01-2025
UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances, Report on Urgent Actions, April 2025.
UN Human Rights Committee, Concluding Observations on Ecuador, December 2024.
IACHR, Precautionary Measures, 24 December 2025. https://www.oas.org/es/cidh/decisiones/mc/2025/res_97-25_mc_402-25_ec_es.pdf
Fiscalía General del Estado, Press Release: Caso Malvinas, December 2025. https://www.fiscalia.gob.ec/caso-malvinas/