“In those moments, I swear to you, you can’t even remember your mother’s name,” Felipe* told InSight Crime about the moment he tried to remember his iCloud password as kidnappers held a gun to his head.
In February 2023, Felipe, who works as a fruit broker for a large company, was the target of a haphazard kidnapping.
“It’s so horrible. You’re in shock, and all you want to do is get out alive. You get to a point where you want to say, ‘‘Listen, just leave me alone. I already gave you everything,’” he said.
Known as express kidnappings and classified as “common crimes” in Ecuador, such incidents get scant attention compared to the transnational drug trafficking that has transformed the country into one of the region’s most violent in less than a decade.
But common crimes like kidnapping and extortion have climbed at alarming rates in recent years. Felipe’s story demonstrates the devastating physical and psychological effects of these crimes on Ecuadorians.
Crimes of Opportunity
Traveling around Ecuador changed after the COVID-19 pandemic, said Felipe.
“You didn’t use to feel the same fear you feel now,” he said.
Statistics from the Interior Ministry show that Ecuador has suffered a meteoric rise in homicides since 2021. The country, which has seen violence related to organized crime mushroom, closed out 2022 with a more than 80% year-on-year rise in murders.
But Felipe said he felt like the danger was far off on the sunny Friday morning when he and his technician made a routine visit to passion fruit fields in the inland province of Los Ríos, which lies just north of coastal Guayas province.
SEE ALSO: Ecuador’s War on Gangs Stumbles in Key Coastal City
The vines on which the passion fruit grew created a curtain of vegetation that blocked Felipe and his colleague’s view of the main road and the five armed men who pulled off the road shortly after them.
The youngest looked barely 20, and the oldest was not yet 30, according to Felipe, who said he thinks they must have seen his truck from the road and decided to steal it and ransom it back to him. But when they realized that the truck belonged to a large company – the kind that has insurance, puts tracking chips in its cars, and does not negotiate with gang members – the criminals changed tack and went after Felipe and his technician instead.
The men identified themselves as members of the Lobos, one of Ecuador’s largest and most violent gangs. But Felipe described them as amateurs, armed with only a revolver, and with their faces uncovered. The man giving orders was also the only one who knew how to drive.
“This was nothing planned. Even the spiel they gave us betrayed that this was random – a crime of opportunity,” Felipe said.
This modus operandi fits an increasingly common pattern in which the street-level cells of Ecuador’s largest drug trafficking groups, like the Choneros and the Lobos, rely primarily on these opportunistic crimes to finance themselves.
But Felipe took no solace from their lack of sophistication.
A Comedy of Errors
As he described the next four hours of his life, Felipe occasionally laughed. Though filled with violence and fear, the encounter played out like a comedy of errors.
The beatings started at once. “They threw us to the ground, beat us, took our phones. Then, they covered our faces and put us in the car,” Felipe recalled.
The young men were scrambling to figure out what to do.
“They were nervous. They were asking us where the guns were, if we had weapons, or if we were policemen,” Felipe told InSight Crime.
The rookie kidnappers knew enough about modern banking to go for their victims’ phones, where bank accounts are accessed through a mobile application, rather than the physical bank cards in their wallets.
SEE ALSO: Financial Vulnerability Fuels Predatory Crime in Peru
They were elated to find Felipe had $1,200 in one of his accounts.
“They were so happy to get money out of this,” Felipe explained. “It was never their intention to hold us for ransom. They hadn’t even considered it.”
But the kidnappers’ good mood didn’t last long. They didn’t know how bank transfers worked, and their inexperience triggered more nervousness and another barrage of violence against Felipe. As he tried to get the necessary information to transfer his bank balance to their account, the youths beat him repeatedly, paranoid that he was asking for their personal data to later report them to the police.
“And of course I was, but not to report them. I was just trying to survive the situation,” Felipe said. “Yet, every question was a tragedy. They beat me for everything.”
With a gun to his head, Felipe finished the bank transfer. But one final hurdle remained. In Ecuador, inter-bank transfers take 20 minutes minimum. Felipe said those minutes, tied up and waiting, felt like the longest of his life.
Forever Changed
In the end, the bank transfer went through. After the kidnappers confirmed the receipt of Felipe’s money, they told him and his technician to count to 100 giving them time to leave. Felipe’s technician had been beaten so badly that he could barely walk, let alone give chase.
It took the two men 15 minutes to hobble to a road and even more time to get someone to stop.
“Nobody wants to help you, no one stops,” Felipe said. “I mean, I wouldn’t either. They see you all dirty, waving desperately.”
Felipe remains haunted by the events of that day and now lives with a permanent sense of insecurity. “I see danger everywhere now. Anyone can hurt me. I no longer stop along the road nor help anyone,” he said.
And, although he says he has moved on, he also describes deep psychological scars.
“At first, I struggled to sleep. I kept hearing their voices,” he said. “I am always on guard.”
His inner world reflects a national shift, one that the government simply wasn’t prepared for.
SEE ALSO: From Rhetoric to Reality on Ecuador’s Security Challenge
While Ecuador has specialized units with operational and investigative expertise to deal with cases of extortion and kidnapping, experts say there is no national policy focused on express kidnappings and few resources to help victims deal with the psychological aftermath.
“The very fact that express kidnapping is a crime of opportunity reveals an absence of a comprehensive national policy to combat it,” Renato Rivera, coordinator of the Organized Crime Observatory of Ecuador, told InSight Crime.
Ecuador’s response to the surging organized crime threat has so far leaned heavily on militarization with near-ubiquitous support from Ecuadorians. But experts say that this only helps impact the perceptions, not the reality, of security.
“The solution will not come from more militarization,” Katherine Herrera Aguilar, a political analyst specializing in public and state security, told InSight Crime.
But Felipe feels boots on the ground serve a purpose
“I feel calmer when there are soldiers on the streets,” he said. “Even though I know it’s a false sense of calm and that the country is still dangerous.”
*For security reasons, InSight Crime has changed the protagonist’s name