The murder of a soldier inside a barracks has caused shock in Ecuador. A 25-year-old second lieutenant with two years in the army, Aidita Pamela Ati, died last Saturday inside the facilities of the 19th Jungle Brigade, which is in the Amazonian province of Napo. The military institution published on social media that the cause of death, according to the initial report, was “asphyxiation due to an airway obstruction while sleeping.” The second lieutenant’s father showed up the next day and the commander received him in his office and explained the following: “There was an unauthorized party and they took my daughter to the room where she was sleeping and she had woken up dead, drowned in liquor.”
A coroner’s report has disproved this version of events: Aidita Pamela Ati died of mechanical asphyxiation by suffocation. In other words, she was strangled, murdered. For the moment, four soldiers have been prosecuted by the Prosecutor’s Office for being suspected of the young woman’s death, which has already been classified as a femicide. The Investigative Police took the version of 18 soldiers who participated in the alleged party. According to the police report, which collected the version of witnesses and those involved, after midnight on Saturday those four soldiers took the second lieutenant to her room and nothing more was known about her until the following morning, when a colleague found her body.
When the family moved as quickly as possible from Quito to Napo, Aidita Pamela’s body had been transferred to another city for an autopsy. “To do that, I should have authorized it and I never did,” complained Luis Ati at a press conference on Monday. In addition, according to the expert report that was given to him, the body of the soldier was found at 6:40, but the family was only called at nine in the morning. “What soldiers are we talking to! Who is defending us, if they are killing our daughters!” said the father indignantly at his daughter’s wake, surrounded by relatives with signs with slogans of Justice for Aidita, Not one lessand proclaimed against the Armed Forces, from which they demand transparency and justice.
Aidita Pamela Ati was going to complete two years of military service and was part of the logistic support command of the Ecuadorian Army. The Public Prosecutor’s Office requested preventive detention against the four soldiers for fear that they would flee or alter the crime scene; however, the judge who heard the case granted them other alternative measures so that they could defend themselves in freedom. The Armed Forces announced that they will also administratively investigate the officers involved in the crime, although the contradictory versions generate doubts and pain for the relatives who demand justice.
A similar case also affected the police in September 2022. Lawyer María Belén Bernal entered the Police School facilities on the outskirts of Quito to see her husband, the police lieutenant. That was the last that was heard from her. After eleven days and at the request of her mother to know what happened to her daughter, Bernal’s body was found on a hill behind the police station. Cáceres fled the country hours after reporting his wife missing. On December 30, 2022, he was located in Colombia and is now serving a 34-year prison sentence for the femicide of his wife.
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