At least 90 dead and 385 injured make up the collateral victims during the year of the greatest violence in the country

The brothers Álex and Maité were 10 and 6 years old. The two died on July 16 in the San Francisco 1 cooperative, in the Nueva Prosperina district, the most violent in Guayaquil. Both were in their home when members of the Los Pitufos gang shot through the window and killed a relative as well as Álex and Maité. One of their sisters was shot, but she was saved.

The three children, two deceased and one injured, were collateral victims of the 4,603 violent deaths that the Police officially registered in 2022., a year in which Ecuador lived scenes never seen in the country. Dismembered, decapitated or bodies hanging from bridges were some of the images of horror in the midst of a war between organized gangs fighting to capture the territories to expand the sale of drugs.

Mortal victims like Álex and Maité were counted by dozens last year. But Dinased does not have official figures. In a brief paragraph, Dinased informed this newspaper “that the sub-areas where there were collateral victims are the following: Azuay, Cañar, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Guayaquil, El Oro, Esmeraldas, Guayas, Loja, Los Ríos, Manabí, Orellana, Santa Elena, Santo Domingo and Sucumbíos”. That is, in 14 provinces of the country, without mentioning the cities, ages or sex of the victims.

However, This newspaper compiled for a year, from January to December 2022, the names of at least half of those murdered and recorded that 90 of the victims were collateral or unintentional, that is to say that the attack was not directed at them. (See graph)

There are, for example, two children who died in the Monte Sinaí neighborhood, in Esmeraldas, on April 17, when a group of men entered a house and killed the Araujo Huila family. An 11-year-old girl tried to flee and was shot, while a 2-year-old boy died of suffocation when he was left under the body of his deceased mother. The family was dedicated, according to the neighbors, to micro-trafficking of drugs, a crime for which, according to the Police, several of the murdered adults had criminal records.

Of the 90 collateral deaths, 36 were men, 23 women, and 31 were children. And 47 of the 90 victims were from Zone 8made up of Guayaquil, Durán and Samborondón.

Among the men are Ángel Chauca, Luis Llamuca and Valerio Valle, who were traveling in an ambulance that was attacked by hitmen who thought that the chonero leader Júnior Roldán, alias Jr., was being transported in it. paramedic and patient, and there were three additional injuries.

The injured were also collateral victims in the midst of the escalation of violence that the country experienced last year. According to the data collected by this newspaper, a total of 385 people (173 from Zone 8) were injured by projectiles or injuries from the attacks with explosives.s that occurred in different sectors of Guayaquil.

Among these attacks is the one that occurred on the so-called Calle 8, on August 14. An attack with explosives caused five deaths, 17 injuries and damage to eight homes and two vehicles. Among the deceased were two women (Roxana Montaño and Ana Lucía Narváez) and three men (Walter Ávila, Carlos Campozano and Vicente Loor).

This Diary not only collected the names of the collateral victims, it also searched for their relatives. Among them, Jenny Chalén and Marisol Tapia, who demand definitive measures against violence from the State. (YO)

More collateral victims

February 23, 2022. A 9-year-old boy was injured in a shooting on 33rd and Capitán Nájera streets, southwest of Guayaquil, and died after being hospitalized for more than a month.

March 23, 2022. Megan, a 3-year-old girl, died near her grandmother’s food stall, in the Dignidad Popular cooperative, in the Malvinas sector, in the south of the city. The minor was struck by one of the bullets that the subjects fired while escaping from a nearby store, which they tried to enter to kill a man who had been released from prison the previous year. In this case, two suspects were arrested.

October 19, 2022. Génesis, 5 years old, received a bullet wound while accompanying her mother to sell fruit in the Trinidad de Dios cooperative, Monte Sinai, northwest of Guayaquil.

December 5, 2022. Justin, 12 years old, was murdered in a barbershop on block 4 of Flor de Bastión, northwest of Guayaquil. Armed subjects entered the business in search of Teodoro Chila Morales, one of the clients who was waiting for his turn to cut his hair. Noticing the attack, the man took the boy as a human shield. Both died and Justin’s father was injured.