A man and a woman were killed, burned and beheaded in a town in Ecuador

Once again, the inhabitants of La Troncal, in Ecuador, witnessed a terror find. Two young men, a man and a woman, were killed, cremated and beheaded in one sector of the area. A month ago, in the same city, the body of a decapitated man was hung from a pedestrian bridge. The police authorities maintain a hypothesis related to the territory struggles of gangs that respond to drug trafficking.

According to the police authorities, a note was found next to the burned corpses that read: “Today it was your worker who was the next quartered will be you”. According to Jorge Vélez, prosecutor in Cañar, in the province where La Troncal is located, the murders of young people are related to the crime of the decapitated and hanged man.

The macabre message would confirm the fight between criminal groups fighting for the sale of drugs in the area. In this conflict, alias Rody, one of the leaders of Los Lobos, would be involved, according to Vélez. Los Lobos are the second largest megaband in Ecuador, with around 8,000 members. This gang is credited with the latest massacre in an Ecuadorian prison, which left at least 20 dead. After that mutiny, five leaders of the gang were transferred to a maximum security prison. The relocation of the leaders of Los Lobos caused protests in four prisons in the country.

On the murdered young people of La Troncal, the first investigations suggest that this would be a “selective crime”. The area's Chief of Police, Rafael Añazco, mentioned that the victims of the atypical murders are not from La Troncal or nearby areas, but come from provinces such as Morona Santiago or Napo, located in the Ecuadorian Amazon, more than 350 kilometers from the city where the bodies appear.

Last weekend, also in La Troncal, an 18-year-old boy was killed inside a nightclub. The police, as part of the investigations, raided the victim's home and found three fired pods, 52 380-caliber bullets, 150 9-millimeter ammunition, a knife, a cell phone and cases containing drugs. The man was killed with several shots to the head and shoulder, as well as sharps wounds.

According to a scientific article by researcher Nuria Carton de Grammont, from Concorde University, the morbid exposure of corpses by cartels, which cause deaths with high levels of cruelty, serves to use the dead as a messenger, “as ammunition and converts to public space ( pedestrian bridges, avenues, monuments, squares, shopping centers and other places) in their main weapon of attack”., this because the corpses “represent territorial marks that identify a territory marked with the blood and bodies of those who fall dead in the hands of organized crime”. Exposing the dead in such a grotesque way becomes “marks that map death that highlights internal struggles over the narcotics market and control of territory”.

La Troncal is located 77 kilometers from Guayaquil, the port city that has been identified as one of the points where drugs are shipped to Europe, Central and North America. The province of Guayas, to which Guayaquil belongs, is one of the most violent in Ecuador, where the number of deaths related to organized crime has tripled in the first months of the year, while drug seizures have doubled, according to information from the authorities. So far in 2022, 34 tons of alkaloids have been seized, while in the same period in 2021 18 tons were seized, which represents almost half of it.

Ecuador faces massive drug trafficking and drug-related violence. The country closed last year with a death toll of 14 per 100,000 inhabitants, which is almost double compared to 2020.

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