On August 26, 2024, in the municipality of Ventanas, Los Rios province, Dave Robin Loor, 20, and Juan Daniel Santillan, 27, were intercepted by two vans with people wearing the Armed Forces uniforms.
They were stopped, searched, and taken into one of the vehicles and since then nothing more has been known about the whereabouts of the two young men.
Lorena Roca, mother of one of them, told local media that she saw them being taken away and tried to find out why they were detained but one of the alleged soldiers pushed her with his rifle and told her to get out of the way because otherwise she would also be arrested.
Roca filed a habeas corpus against the Joint Command of the Armed Forces, the Ministry of Defense, the National Police, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ombudsman’s Office, and the Attorney General’s Office, and asked that the case be declared an enforced disappearance.
Although the Armed Forces initially denied their participation, a leaked military report confirmed that the soldiers involved belong to the Special Forces Group No. 25 South Base, as revealed in a report by journalists Karol Noroña and Jetssael Orozco.
jrr/jav/mem/avr