GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador: Crime has taken a cruel turn in Ecuador, where kidnappers frequently amputate their victims’ fingers and send photos to pressure relatives to pay higher ransoms.
Ecuador was a refuge of peace wedged in a dangerous region for decades. But these days, it increasingly resembles nearby Peru and Colombia, two huge producers of cocaine with violent criminal histories.
In March, the wife of a businessman in the port city of Guayaquil received images of someone snipping two fingers off her husband’s left hand, threatening to mutilate him further unless they were paid $100,000.
At the end of 2022, police released a photograph of a member of the Chilean Navy who’d had two fingers lopped off during a kidnapping while he was in the country visiting a girlfriend.
Social media lit up in April when an x-ray of a hand with no fingers made the rounds. The image was of an Ecuadoran migrant to the United States tangled in a kidnapping during a vacation back home.
For the first five months of the year, reports of kidnappings tripled to 189 cases compared to the same period in 2022, when 60 cases were tallied. That number is still widely believed to be underreported.
Some kidnappers seek a quick payout, demanding ransoms as low as $5,000. Expert Luis Cordova told AFP a “frightening” campaign of attacks was putting pressure on a government mired in a public safety crisis.
The port city of Guayaquil, which has a population of almost three million, is emerging as a crime hub, with car bombings, jail massacres, victims with severed limbs swinging from bridges, and kidnappings. —AFP/APP
