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Drug trafficking and insecurity leave their mark in Esmeraldas
Posted On 10 Apr 2016
She had a feeling that her firstborn Elkin, 9, would return home scared, even wounded, but alive. Jessica Nazareno, 31, waited anxiously after a sharp pain in the belly mader her go to bed around 14:00 of March 4, when she heard that her son had disappeared: “The pain of a sensitive mother and I felt that my son was not ok.”
And he was not. The body of the child appeared throat cut and wrapped in a mattress at 19:30 the same day he was kidnapped. It was in the yard of a house near his own, where he lived with his parents and his 3 year old brother, Same, in a handful of houses surrounding hotels and apartments for vacation at the foot of the sea in the Tonchigüe parish, in the Atacames county, in the province of Esmeraldas.
In 2015, Esmeraldas recorded a rate of 17 violent deaths per hundred thousand inhabitants, according to police figures. This is more than double the national average of 6.4 cases per hundred thousand inhabitants. The Interior Ministry grouped under this term cases of killings and assassinations (I).
