Valentina, Bryanna, Adiel and Aitana were their names. They were children, four brothers. They were seven, five, three years and five months old. It was 9:20 p.m. on Monday, they were sleeping in a small room when the massacre occurred. The hitmen arrived at his house in Guasmo, south of Guayaquil, they did not look, they just pointed through the window glass and shot without discrimination. For Rosa, her 24-year-old mother, her instinct made her jump on her children to use her body as a shield and protect them, but she could not prevent the tragedy. The four children were shot to death by the two criminals who, according to the first police indications, went to the wrong house.
The hypothesis used by the Police is that the house the hitmen were looking for was the one next to the Pinto family's green house where the minors slept. There lived Jordan Tomalá, 36 years old, with a criminal record for robbery and drug trafficking and who more than a year ago they tried to murder in a cantina in another part of the city, but he survived. He is known for selling drugs in the neighborhood and fled at the time of the shooting.
When the agents entered the subject's house, they found credentials of his association with the Los Choneros criminal group and the sculpture of Santa Muerte, which drug traffickers venerate for their protection, and next to it, a photo of him. The hitmen fled in the white car in which they arrived and which they burned hours later at the other end of the city. The suspects belong to the Los Lagartos criminal gang, according to the first police indications. This criminal group tries to maintain control of the territory in the Guasmo sector with bullets and blood, a densely populated neighborhood of approximately 300,000 inhabitants, where the majority of people try to survive from informal work in the streets, construction and cleaning houses.
This is not the only criminal group that disputes a part of the territory in this neighborhood; other criminal organizations remain in conflict to take over routes for drug trafficking and other crimes. In the midst of this war that takes place in the streets, hospitals, near schools and without Government control, 310 minors have been murdered as collateral victims in 2023.
“As an institution, if we make an evaluation of how many people have been collateral victims of these events, elderly people, pregnant women, children, we insist that we need changes in the laws, so that they are coercive tools to give us that possibility that it will not be repeated again,” said Víctor Herrera Leiva, commander of the Police of the so-called zone 8, where Guayaquil is located, the most violent in the country, where more than 2,400 people have been murdered in 2023. The crimes occur daily throughout the country, which already totals 6,900 this year. Not even 10% have had a resolution in court and the vast majority continue to go unpunished.
For this reason, the Pinto family has left the case in the hands of divine justice. Rosa is seriously injured in intensive care at the hospital and Jhordan, the children's father, was the one who removed the bodies of his children from the morgue. The Government of Daniel Noboa, who has not yet explained what the action plan will be to combat the high crime rate in the country, issued a statement the next day on social networks in which he assured that there will be “no room for impunity, nor will it be ceded.” “before those who try to sow terror.”
Follow all the international information on Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
#brothers #shot #death #hitmen #sleeping #Guayaquil