By Catalino Hoyos | 2025-04-29

QUITO -- Eliana was just 15 years old when she brandished a rifle and stormed the Ambato General Teaching Hospital in Ecuador on March 19, alongside six other members of the Los Lobos criminal gang.

Hours later, authorities found her lifeless body on the banks of the Ambato river.

She suffered a fatal wound in the shootout at the hospital, where she had been attempting to rescue an injured fellow gang member who was receiving treatment while in custody.

Although her name never appeared on the official lists of missing persons, her story starkly exposes the alarming rise of child recruitment in Ecuador -- a phenomenon that pulls adolescents into the grip of organized crime and often condemns them to an early, anonymous death.

The wave of violence that has gripped Ecuador in recent years has drastically worsened the disappearance of children and adolescents.

In 2023, the Ministry of the Interior reported 171 missing minors; a year later, that figure had nearly doubled to 322 cases. In just the first few months of 2025, up to March 18, an average of three minors disappeared every day.

These statistics account only for cases in which children had not returned home after 20 days.

An investigation by CONNECTAS, based on data from the Ministry of the Interior and published on April 10, revealed that between 2017 and today, the whereabouts of at least 868 children and adolescents in Ecuador remain unknown.

Analysts and researchers told the outlet that the causes behind these disappearances are varied but converge around three major factors: forced recruitment by criminal gangs, sexual exploitation and the growing influence of organized crime across the country.

Miguel Egas, director of the Police's Missing Persons Unit (Dinased), confirmed to CONNECTAS that organized armed groups are forcibly recruiting minors to incorporate them into their criminal networks.

Girls bear the worst of it

An alarming statistic reveals that 71% of missing minors are girls, many of whom gangs recruits not only for criminal activities but for sexual abuse.

"Girls are ... subjected to sexual recruitment," said an anonymous source in testimony collected by the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDH), a nongovernmental organization, and published at the end of 2023.

According to the testimony, some minors become the "property" of criminal leaders. "If a girl started associating with one of them, she was no longer allowed to see anyone else. She was always watched by someone he assigned," the source explained.

Katherine Herrera, an academic specializing in public security and a policy consultant, has closely studied this phenomenon.

According to her report "Double Criminalization in High-Risk Cantons in Ecuador," published in 2023, gangs often recruit children between the ages of 12 and 17 because they can more easily evade law enforcement controls.

"Illegal organizations prefer minors because they can transport drugs or weapons without raising suspicion among authorities," Herrera explained.

Her study highlights the economic incentives behind this recruitment. A minor can earn between $3,000 and $4,000 for his (or her) services within gangs involved in drug trafficking and extortion.

Momentary riches and excitement

In a country where more than 25% of children live in extreme poverty, such sums -- equivalent to more than the monthly minimum wage ($470) -- represent the promise of immediate, albeit fleeting and dangerous, social mobility.

"These groups manipulate them so thoroughly that they anchor their thinking in the day-to-day," Herrera said. "They don't think about the future, about whether they might die. They don't measure the consequences of their actions. What drives them is adrenaline, and they want to stay in that cycle."

The data reflect the depth of the crisis. According to Herrera, the main offenses committed by minors are crimes against property (35%), drug trafficking (17%) and crimes against public safety (16%).

On the street corners of the poorest neighborhoods in Guayaquil and across other Ecuadorian cities, the presence of criminal groups has become as common as the rumble of traffic or the shouts echoing from improvised soccer fields.

In these streets, childhood and crime now coexist uneasily, separated by a thread that grows thinner every day -- a thread woven from poverty, abandonment and impunity of top-ranking criminals. And with each passing day, more children find themselves pushed across it.