Insecurity and fear erode the spirit on these dates which should be a day of unity, peace, reflection and family. Of all families.

‘Crime has already lost respect for everyone’: these are the neighborhoods with the most murders in Guayaquil, Durán and Samborondón in 2023.

I wait with almost diabolical impatience for news about a fierce attack on drug crime, and when I hear about massacres in prisons or among criminal groups, the phrase that I hear so many times comes to mind: “let them kill each other”.

It’s my first instinct that speaks, the one for survival. However, human beings have the ability to distance themselves from the immediate and be able to think with regard to the bigger picture.

A drug culture has established itself in the country and has not only increased the rates of robberies, extortion, assaults and kidnappings. These criminal groups have become very well structured organizations that attract and recruit hundreds of children and youth who join the ranks of drug trafficking and crime at an early age.

The murder of four children in Guayaquil: how many more deaths are expected?

Why do children and young people enter this brutal life? It is said that it is because of the seduction of an easy life, but also because of a deep lack of love, because of abandonment, because of the suffocation of life in dysfunctional families, because of dragging a dislocated and reckless soul, to swallow so much once and for all. fucking sadness and misery, hunger and lack of love, it doesn’t matter if the bullets go through, wrote Javier Valdés.

This challenge concerns all of us, the state and citizens, we cannot turn our backs on them as a society and leave them alone.

Eliza Marbet Tezoco, from the Autonomous University of Puebla, in her research identifies three causes in social and emotional development that lead minors to join these criminal groups.

First and foremost is domestic violence, with problems such as family breakdown, child abandonment, labor exploitation and sex work. Exposure to domestic violence compromises the ability to form attachments, a vulnerability exploited by criminal gangs who offer them the promise of belonging and care, regardless of the cost.

Nueva Prosperina, the northwestern part of Guayaquil, the third most violent place in the world

Another cause is social violence, with visible problems of inequality increasing poverty and school dropout rates. In addition, schools have become recruiting bases for criminal groups, with high levels of violence and the normalization of drug culture.

The third cause is institutional violence, which has to do with negligence and corruption that has paved the way for the drug trade to take its toll on the integrity of minors.

In Ecuador, a person is killed every hour: 7,258 cases, a new record of violent death

Violence is a common factor shared by these three points and is potentially detrimental to the integrity and well-being of children and adolescents.

This problem is a social time bomb and we have to face it.

We must work with families to save these children and young people.

Two children and two adults from the same family died in an attack on a house in Posorj

This challenge concerns all of us, the state and citizens, we cannot turn our backs on them as a society and leave them alone.

So instead of thinking “let them kill each other”, we might bet “let them save themselves with us”. Merry Christmas. (OR)