Eleven Ecuadorean soldiers have been sentenced to 34 years in prison each after being found guilty of the forced disappearance of four boys last year.
The discovery of the beaten and burned remains of the four boys, aged between 11 and 15, shocked the violence-wracked nation.
The court found a military patrol had picked up the boys as they returned from playing football in the city of Guayaquil, forced them to strip off their clothes, beat them and left them naked in a desolate, dangerous and abandoned location.
One of the boys called his father but, by the time he arrived, they were no longer there. Their burned bodies were found days later close to a military base near Guayaquil.
In total, 17 soldiers were on trial over the disappearance of 15-year-old Nehemías Arboleda, 11-year-old Steven Medina, and brothers Ismael, 15, and Josué Arroyo, 14.
Eleven of the soldiers were sentenced to 34 years and eight months in prison and five were given reduced sentences of two and a half years for co-operating with the prosecution.
A lieutenant-colonel who had not been on patrol with the rest of the group was declared not guilty.
The soldiers had been sent on patrol as part of the government’s crackdown on criminal gangs in the country, which has seen its crime rate skyrocket as the gangs’ power has expanded.
Defence officials had originally said that the four children, who became known as The Malvinas Four after the neighbourhood the were from, had been stopped by the patrol because they were suspects in a robbery.
But the judge ruled that they had been “innocent victims of a state crime” and ordered that their families be issued with an official apology and that the four victims be commemorated with a plaque.
He also ordered that military personnel undergo human rights training.
The judge said that evidence provided by the five soldiers who had co-operated with the prosecution had revealed the cruelty with which the 16 soldiers on patrol had acted.
He said that they had deliberately taken the four boys to a desolate area, where they subjected them to racist insults, beatings and even a simulated execution.
Defence lawyers had argued that because the boys were alive when the soldiers left, the accused were not responsible for their death.
But the judge concluded that leaving them in such a dangerous and desolate location “was the cause of the victims’ death”. It is not known who burned the bodies.
