Kidnappers in Ecuador resort to cutting off victims’ fingers to get hefty ransoms as crime jumps
- Ecuador is in grip of a ‘frightening’ campaign of attacks where kidnappers regularly amputate the fingers of their victims to seek a quick payout
- Those held for ransom are often kept in bathrooms, with hands bound and in constant terror, as gangs negotiate with their relatives
Crime has taken a sadistic turn in Ecuador, where kidnappers now regularly amputate the fingers of their victims and send images to pressure relatives to pay higher ransoms.
For decades, Ecuador was a refuge of peace wedged in a dangerous region. But these days, it increasingly resembles nearby Peru and Colombia, two huge producers of cocaine with violent criminal histories.
In March, the wife of a businessman in the port city of Guayaquil received images of someone snipping two fingers off her husband’s left hand, threatening to mutilate him further unless they were paid US$100,000.
At the end of 2022, police released a photograph of a member of the Chilean navy who’d had two fingers lopped off during a kidnapping while he was in the country visiting a girlfriend.
Social media lit up in April when an X-ray of a hand with no fingers made the rounds. The image was of an Ecuadorean migrant to the United States ensnared in a kidnapping during a holiday back home.
For the first five months of the year, reports of kidnappings tripled to 189 cases compared to the same period in 2022, when 60 cases were tallied.