An Ecuadorian family has been kidnapped in Mexico for 17 days by a criminal group without being able to receive diplomatic help because Ecuador does not have a consular representation in that country due to the diplomatic conflict following the attack on the Embassy in Quito. The family had left Mexico City on June 16 for Nogales, their second attempt to cross the border into the United States. When the bus arrived in Durango, a group of immigration police got on to ask for papers, and at that moment Joseline García lost contact with her family. “My daughter wrote to me and sent me a photo with the police on the bus, from then on I did not hear anything from them until a week later,” explains the woman, who was also traveling with the entire family, but on the difficult journey they separated three months before the kidnapping.
On the night of Three Kings’ Day, Joseline, her three daughters, ages 15, 13, and 3, her 56-year-old mother, and her teenage sister, each took a backpack, filled it with some clothes, a toothbrush, and a pair of shoes, and went to the airport. Her older sister, who lives in the United States, paid for the tickets for the six women to begin the dangerous journey from El Salvador, a country that does not require a visa from Ecuadorians. “We are not migrating for the American dream, we are fleeing the country’s insecurity,” says Joseline. At the end of 2022, one of her brothers was murdered by one of the criminal gangs, after refusing to be recruited to sell drugs in the neighborhood where they lived south of Guayaquil. “We had to move house, change the girls’ school, but the threats continued,” explains the woman. The warnings they received were not to report it, because the family knew who had killed the brother. “There is no place in Ecuador where we could flee because this gang is everywhere in the country,” he added.
The six women began the journey with just enough money and without a penny. coyote (human trafficker) who would plan and pay for the route. Only upon reaching the border in Guatemala did they lose the only cash they had to make the entire trip. “The police themselves stole the 2,500 dollars we had or else they would deport us,” Joseline says. The rest of the days they wandered around looking for a place to sleep. That’s how they reached Mexico City, where they managed to stay in humanitarian tents.
Three months after leaving Ecuador, when they made their first attempt to cross the border, Joseline, her mother, her teenage sister and her three daughters walked for more than twelve hours. “Our feet were covered in sores, my mother had fainted twice, the girls were dehydrated,” the woman says. Once in Samalayuca, at the entrance to Ciudad Juárez, Joseline had to separate from the family to continue the journey and find a way for them to continue the journey in a car. But the family was detained and sent to Tabasco, at the other end of the country, on the border with Guatemala. There the odyssey began again for the mother and the four girls. Joseline managed to cross the border and is in New York in a refugee shelter.
When Maria, Joseline’s mother, tried for the second time to reach the border with the girls, they were kidnapped in Durango, along with all the migrants who were on the bus. The next time Joseline heard from them was when the kidnappers called her at 1:40 a.m. on a Monday to tell her how much it would cost to free each of her relatives and she heard her daughter’s voice. “They say they have them on the floor and without food,” says the mother, who admits that during one of the calls she lost her calm and shouted at the criminals who had threatened to rape the girls. “They are asking us for $4,500 for each one. Where am I going to get that money?” she adds. She has not gotten the $22,000 they asked for, but through loans with 30 percent interest, she has gathered $12,000, to calm them down and prevent them from abusing the women. “But they already threatened me that they were going to do something against them, because they say that I don’t care about them because I haven’t paid everything. They have no compassion.”
When Joseline received confirmation that her family was kidnapped, she asked the Ecuadorian consulate in New York for help, but they told her that they couldn’t do anything, that any procedure was more complicated at this time after the closure of the consulates in that country due to the diplomatic conflict caused by the presidential order to force their way into the Mexican Embassy in Quito to capture Jorge Glas. And they sent her to the offices in Phoenix, which is five hours away by plane. “I barely have enough to survive and they want me to travel there,” she claims. Several officials from the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs have contacted the family, Joseline admits, but none have told her about a specific plan in these cases. “They ask me for information every day, but no one is really doing anything to help us free them and I fear that my daughters will not be able to endure this hell any longer,” says the mother.
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