Draft:Restrepo case

The case of the Restrepo brothers is a case of forced disappearance and violation of human rights that took place in Ecuador in 1988 during the presidency of León Febres-Cordero. It has been described as a state crime:

Éste es uno de los casos emblemáticos de la violación de los derechos humanos en el Ecuador en las últimas décadas y ha sido catalogado como un crimen de Estado no solo por el tipo de delito agravado cometido (detención, tortura, ejecución extrajudicial y desaparición forzada de dos menores de edad) sino por los esfuerzos concertados de la institución policial para engañar, ocultar la verdad, encubrir e intentar que quedara en la impunidad. 

The case started with the disappearance of brothers Carlos Santiago and Pedro Andrés Restrepo Arismendi, who were born in Quito in 1971 and 1974, respectively. At the time of their disappearance, they were 17 and 14 years old. They came from a wealthy family, and their parents, Pedro Restrepo and Luz Helena Arismendi, were Colombians who had been living in Ecuador for 20 years. The bodies of the brothers have never been found.

Yambo Lagoon, nestled between the provinces of Cotopaxi and Tungurahua, where it is believed the bodies were dumped.

Background

On the morning of 8 January 1988, Carlos Santiago and Pedro Andrés Restrepo Arismendi left their home to go pick up a friend. Their parents, who were out of the country at the time on holiday, had left them home alone with their younger sister, María Fernanda.

The siblings left their home—located in Miravalle, an upper-middle class neighborhood in the northeast side of Quito—in an sand-colored Jeep Trooper, with license plate number PHD-355. They were headed towards the corner of Río Coca Street and Shyris Avenue to pick up a friend to take him to the airport, but they never arrived at their destination.

Their parents, Pedro Restrepo and Luz Helena Arismendi, started searching for them immediately, aided by some friends and family. At first, they were informed that the brothers were being held at the Pre-Trial Detention Center (CDP) after having fled from a police checkpoint because they did not have a driver's license. Army General Miguel Arellano confirmed to the family that, based on military intelligence reports, their children were being held by the police. However, when the family arrived at the CDP, they were told this information was not true.

Second Police Lieutenant Doris Morán was put in charge of the investigations. She put together a committee, along with agents Camilo Badillo and Rubén Carranco, to look for the missing brothers but ultimately led the investigation astray by planting false information for months. She gave the family false hopes, claiming that the brothers were alive but that it was necessary to keep quiet and be patient. Months later, Morán charged the family a "fee" for her services, totaling 80,000 sucres. She was later removed from the case, investigated for bribery, and convicted as an accessory in the brothers' disappearance.

Conflicting reports

When Rodrigo Borja Cevallos took office as president of Ecuador on 10 August 1988, the hopes of the Restrepo family were renewed for the case to be looked at by the authorities. Borja Cevallos put his Interior Minister Andrés Vallejo in charge of the investigation, although the latter only created an official investigative commission almost two years after the Borja administration had taken office.

Meanwhile, the administration of Colombian President Virgilio Barco Vargas sent personnel from the Administrative Department of Security (DAS) to Ecuador to launch an investigation of its own. The DAS report concluded that the Ecuadorian police was responsible for the detención, tortura y desaparición  of the brothers.

On 28 June 1990, the National Police responded to these accusations by publishing its own report, which spoke of the possibility of the brothers having died after their vehicle had fallen off the Paccha ravine (located in the region of El Batán, Quito) and their bodies being carried away by the water current. More than a month after the disappearance, two laborers had found the remains of the brothers' vehicle at the bottom of the ravine.

However, nothing had turned up during earlier searches in the same spot conducted by the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, and the fire brigade, which raised suspicions about the police report. In addition, there were several inconsistencies, such as:

• the jeep's ignition switch had been found in the "off" position and the key was missing;
• the vehicle didn't show any signs of having tipped over by itself, but rather to have been destroyed first and then forcibly tipped over;
• the vehicle also showed signs of having been ransacked, as both the engine and the gearbox were missing;
• earlier searches in the area had found no evidence of any kind of wreckage happening there in the three days following the disappearance;
• the three shoes that had been found at the site of the alleged incident, and which were recognized by Luz Helena as having belonged to her sons, were in perfect condition despite supposedly having been exposed to the elements for the past six months.

Due to these suspicions and inconsistencies in the two contradictory reports, as well as the outrage they caused among the Ecuadorian people and the "soured relations with mighty Colombia," Borja had no choice but to install an International Commission to lead an investigation.

In August 1991, former police officer Hugo España Torres, who had served in the Criminal Investigation Service (SIC) (an anti-subversive police division allegedly created to put a stop to opposition movements), gave the following statements to the International Commission:

(...) a las 8 y media de la noche llegó el sargento [Guillermo] Llerena con dos detenidos, menores de edad, y me indicó que los ubique en celdas separadas; al preguntar los nombres de los menores, ellos me indicaron que se llamaban Santiago y Pedro Andrés. Llerena regresó y se llevó al mayor de los jóvenes, luego regreso con él, pero cargándolo a cuesta y en compañía del agente conocido como "el chocolate".

España added that he had refused to receive the brothers due to the condition in which they had been taken in, and thus the other agents took them away with destination unknown. Although España drafted a report about the incident, SIC chief Trajano Barrionuevo ordered him to keep silent and follow Llerena's orders. On the evening of 12 January 1988, Llerena, España, and two other agents took the brothers to Yambo Lagoon, where they hid three plastic bags they had previously picked up from a cave near Guápulo. España stated that when Llerena had asked him to fill the bags with rocks and sand, he had been able to notice a head and an arm inside. The agents then got on a boat and threw the bodies overboard into the lagoon.

In 1996, España published his own account of the events in the book El testigo, in which he revealed how the Restrepo brothers had been "illegally and arbitrarily" detained by the National Police and handed over to the jurisdiction of the SIC in Pichincha, where he worked. According to him, the brothers had been tortured by members of the SIC-10 for several days, and Carlos Santiago had died because of this. In his book, España explained how a police officer had put a plastic bag full of tear gas over Carlos Santiago's head and proceeded to hit him repeatedly on the stomach. According to España, this had triggered an asthma attack in the boy. The agent added that the youngest brother, Pedro Andrés, had been killed days later in an attempt to eliminate the only witness.

Aftermath

On 16 November 1994, Supreme Court Chief Justice Francisco Acosta Yépez passed sentence on the case:

• Guillermo Llerena and Víctor Badillo are found to be the perpetrators and sentenced to 16 years of "special long-term imprisonment"
• Colonel Trajano Barrionuevo, Lieutenant Juan Sosa, and Second Lieutenant Doris Morán are found to be accessories to the crime and sentenced to eight years
• General Gilberto Molina and former agent Hugo España are charged with being accessories after the fact and sentenced to two years

On 20 May 1998, during the presidency of Fabián Alarcón, a friendly settlement agreement was reached on the matter of complaint number 11.868 filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, pursuant to which the Ecuadorian State accepted its responsibility for the facts. The State agreed to pay compensation in the form of a one-time payment of two million U.S. dollars to Pedro Restrepo and to renew the search for the bodies of the missing brothers.

Subsequent searches for the bodies of Pedro and Santiago have been carried out since then, with the last one having taken place on 26 August 2009 in Yambo Lagoon. No bodies were found and the authorities only took stock of the items found in the lagoon, which included weapons, plastic materials, shoes, bullet shells, among others. On 2 December 2011, the Prosecutor's Office renewed the investigations on the basis of statements given by gravediggers at the El Batán cemetery in Quito, where several bodies were dug up to carry out DNA testing.

Since 1988, no government administration in Ecuador has been able to tell the truth about what happened to the Restrepo brothers. Former President Rafael Correa reopened the case but didn't reach any definitive conclusion. He was never able to fulfill the promise he had made:

Si tenemos que vaciar Yambo para encontrar los cuerpos de Santiago y Andrés, lo vaciaremos.

See also

• With My Heart in Yambo
• Escuadrones volantes
• León Febres Cordero

Bibliography

• Amón Jimbo, Melina Dalí; Cárdenas Segarra, Paúl Andrés; Aucapiña Guamán, Diego Ismael (2023). Manipulación de información en crímenes cometidos por miembros de la Policía Nacional del Ecuador, casos: Restrepo, Fybeca y María Belén Bernal (PDF) (Bachelor's degree in journalism thesis) (in Spanish). Cuenca, Ecuador: University of Cuenca.
• Barraza Morelle, Cecilia (1995). Análisis comparativo de dos casos de violación a los derechos humanos: Ecuador y Chile caso "Restrepo"- caso "Degollados" (PDF) (Master's degree in political science thesis) (in Spanish). Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences.
• España Torres, Hugo Efraín (1996). El testigo: el caso Restrepo y otros delitos de Estado (in Spanish). Quito: Editorial Abya-Yala. pp. 101–127. ISBN 9789978042144.
• Inter-American Court of Human Rights (2010). Sin verdad no hay justicia: Crímenes de lesa humanidad (PDF) (in Spanish). ISBN 978-9978-92-848-6.
• van Dongen, Toine (August 1992). "The Restrepo Case: Murky Waters". Human Rights Quarterly. 14 (3). Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press : 289–302. doi:10.2307/762368. ISSN 1085-794X. OCLC 33418941.

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• People murdered in Ecuador
• Enforced disappearance
• Extrajudicial killings
• Missing people
• Missing children