At 9:30 in the morning on January 8,1988, 17-year-old Santiago Restrepo and his 14-year-old brother Andr6s left their home in a prosperous suburb of Quito in the family’ s Chevrolet Trooper. It was summer vacation, and the boys were on their way to pick up a friend to take him to the airport. Santiago didn’t have a driver’s license, but he was a responsible first-year university student, and in Ecuador it is not unusual for young people to drive before the legal age. Somewhere between their home and the friend’s house, the two brothers and their car disappeared.
More than three years later, in August 1991, an international commission composed of human rights and legal specialists released its report. After a 14-month investigation, the Restrepo Commission determined that members of the Ecuadorian national police (SIC) had detained, tortured, killed and “disappeared” the young brothers. The re-
Judy Blankenship is a freelance photographerandwriterpresentlybased in Ecuador.
year cover-up which extended from the lowest ranks to the highest echelons of the police and government. Falsified documents, destroyed evidence, lies, stonewalling and the fabrication of a complex web of false leads were all used to confound the facts of the case and keep the boys’ parents, Pedro and Elena Restrepo, believing that their sons might still be alive.
On September 3, 1991, in an immediate and extraordinary response to the Restrepo Commission’s report, President Rodrigo Borjaissued a decree abolishing the national police. The following day SIC offices throughout the country were closed, and 1,600 police agents lost their jobs (some only temporarily, as it turned out). The drastic move left the transit police as the only armed authority besides the military (which generally keeps a low public profile). Boja also announced that the international commission, with new members, would investigate the cases of 30 other families who claim they lost relatives atthe hands of the police or military during the 1980s.
spised. Its agents were famous for their low levels of education, poor training, low pay, and rampant corruption. They were known to use torture as a routine part of interrogation, and they were suspected of extra-judicial executions and disappearances. SIC agents had always acted with impunity, in part because the police and military have their own judicial systems, separate from the civilian courts. Not surprisingly, no police officer or military official has ever been convicted of human rights abuse in Ecuador.
Thirteen police agents and officials named in the commission report were immediately arrested, among them Gen. Gilberto Molina, chief of the national police force at the time of the boys’ disappearance. The Restrepo family brought additional charges against 40 police and government officials, including ex-ministers, whom they believe played a direct or implicit role in the cover-up.
Three weeks after the release of the report, the apparent suicide of Gen. Jorge Pav6n, president of the National Police Court of Justice-where police crimes are normally tried-excited speculation about how far police culpability extended. Later, rumors circulated that Pav6n might have been killed by the national police for having stated publicly that police officials who commit human rights offenses should not be granted immunity from civilian justice.
The Historical Milieu
Prosperous Colombians who have lived in Ecuador for 20 years, the Restrepos are not the sort of family that is usually touched by state repression. Indeed why the brothers were detained by the police in the first place remains a mystery. The historical contextprovides some clues. The ultra-right civilian regime of Le6n Febres-Cordero succeeded the more liberal government of Jaime Rold6s in 1984, when a small armed insurgency called Alfaro Vive Carajo, primarily made up of university students, first emerged. Febres-Cordero swore that his government would be remembered for wiping out subversion in Ecuador.
“And he did that-literally, physically-assassinating at least ten Alfaro leaders,” says Elsie Monge, a Maryknoll nun and president of the Ecumenical Commission for Human Rights in Quito. “He set up and consolidated a complex counterinsurgency apparatus inside the police and armed forces that will never bedismantled. It’s notthattorture didn’t exist before; it did. But it wasn’t as systematic or sophisticated. It hadn’t yet been institutionalized.” The counterinsurgency network indiscriminately targeted peasant organizations, trade unions, university and even high school student groups as potential or actual subversives, and the national police were given extraordinary powers to repress the so-called “communist threat.” At the same time, Ecuador was becoming a favored conduit for drug traffic between Peru and Colombia, a further pretext to increase repression.
Between 1984 and 1988, the Ecumenical Commission for Human Rights received formal complaints against the police for 240 cases of torture, 120 assassinations, 500 illegal detentions, and six disappearances. Ecuador appeared for the first time in Amnesty International’s “black book” as a country with significant human-rights abuses.
“My sons’ disappearance was aprod-uct of this milieu,” said Pedro Restrepo in a recent interview. “Their apprehension was not planned. They were two kids from a good family, completely apolitical. By law there was no reason to detain the boys, but the police didn’t need a legal reason. No one is held accountable because it is state policy.” Santiago and Andr6s Restrepo had the bad luck to drive into the counter-insurgency net the police had cast. On the day the boys disappeared, SIC agents, acting as traffic police, were carrying out a vehicle check on a major road where the brothers most likely traveled. SIC officials admitted to the Restrepo Commission that they regularly used this method to check for arms, drug traffic, and “subversives.” No witness has come forward to tell what happened, but most likely the Restrepo car was stopped in a random check, Santiago’s lack of a driver’s license was used as an excuse to detain the brothers, and from there events took their tragic course.
The Restrepo parents brought all their resources to bear on the search for their missing sons. Relatives, friends and volunteers spent the first three days after the disappearance combing the roads the boys might have taken. Fruitless inquiries were made at Quito hospitals and jails. Family members from Colombia arrived in Quito to aid the search and support the family. Two days after the disappearance, Pedro and ElenaRestrepo registered a formal missing persons’ complaint with the national police. That moment marked the beginning of a four-year Kafkaesque nightmare, which has yet to end.
Ironically, in the beginning the family felt their best hope lay in cooperating with the police. The police assigned an inexperienced 23-year-old sub-lieutenant, Doris Morin, to investigate the disappearances. In testimony before the Restrepo Commission, Mordn admitted that she was promoted to head the minors’ brigade, responsible for investigating crimes involving anyone under 18, only hours before being assigned the case.
She ingratiated herself with the Restrepo family, virtually living with them as she “investigated” the disappearance. She assured the parents that an informant had told her their sons were alive, but she insisted that if the boys were to be recovered, no information relating to the case could be made public. During the next eight months, with the complicity of other police agents, Morin extorted money, the use of vehicles, and other resources from the Restrepos to follow up a series of false leads all over the country. Frequently, one or both parents accompanied her, or members of her team, on trips to remote places where their sons had supposedly been spotted. The family covered the daily hotel and food expenses of the agents. Mordn reported to her superiors any new developments in the Restrepos’ independent efforts to find their sons. Mordn was arrested following the release of the Restrepo Commission report last year; she remains in custody awaiting trial.
On February 13, 1988, more than a month after the brothers’ disappearance, the destroyed remains of the Chevrolet Trooper were found in a deep ravine along a route that had been exhaustively searched in the days following the disappearance. No bodies were recovered. The police made bumbling attempts to re-create the accident in which they claimed the boys had lost their lives, and then pretended to investigate it. It was obviously a cover-up: the car was found without a motor or transmission, the ignition was off, the keys gone, and the steering wheel in perfect shape with no sign of human impact. Most glaring was the absence of any blood or hair to indicate the brothers were inside the car when it began its long tumble into the ravine. (An FBI agent was brought in by the commission to corroborate this point.) The police suggested to the increasingly skeptical Restrepo family that the boys’ bodies must have been carried away by the river at the bottom of the ravine (although the water was under two feet deep at that time of year), or been eaten by “aquatic animals.” In a macabre touch, police investigators showed Elena Restrepo a well-worn shoe they said had been found at the site. She identified it as one of a new pair her younger son wore for the first time the day of the disappearance.
A Public Protest
The Restrepos waited an agonizing 11 months before deciding in Decem-ber 1988 to make public their conviction that the police were responsible for the disappearance of their sons, and that they were the victims of a cruel hoax. They appeared on radio and TV talk shows, gave interviews to the print media, traveled around the country, and related their experience at numerous public meetings.
In February, 1989, with the human rights commission’s support, the family began to hold weekly demonstrations in the plaza in front of the Presidential Palace in Quito, where they stood silently with placards and photographs of the missing boys. For months the family and human rights commission members stood alone. Slowly, however, support grew. Gaining confidence from the Restrepos’ example, other families with relatives who had been tortured, killed or disappeared joined them in the plaza.
Finally, in May, 1989, pressure from the Restrepo family, the Colombian government, human-rights activists, the media and public outcry arising from the increasing weight of evidence forced a response. President Borja decided to constitute and finance an international investigative commission.
During its 14-month investigation, the Restrepo Commission gathered a great deal of circumstantial evidence that strongly implicated the police and government officials in the crime and its subsequent cover-up. But it found nothing concrete until an ex-SIC agent came forward late in the investigation with startling details of the case.
Hugo Espafia testified that he was on duty at the receiving desk of the SIC detention center in Quito the night of January 8, 1988. Between eight and nine o’clock that evening, he said, two well-dressed boys were brought in by Sgt. Llerena. Following the sergeant’s instructions, Espafia registered the two boys in the police log and isolated them in separate cells. Minutes later he saw the sergeant take away the olderbrother, Santiago, for interrogation. Forty-five minutes later the boy was brought back -severely beaten, nearly unconscious and unable to stand-supported between Llerena and another agent. When his younger brother Andr6s saw this, he screamed for someone to call his parents, Espafia told the commission, but the sergeant called him a mafioso and told him to shut up. When Llerena at-
Espafia to be returned to a cell, Espafia refused to accept him in such bad condition for fear he might be implicated in the torture. Minutes later Espafia saw police agents take the brothers out of the SIC detention center. They were never seen alive again.
Three days later, Espafia told the commission, he was called into the office of the SIC chief in Quito for a meeting with other agents, where they were told to maintain strict silence on the Restrepo case. Late that night, Espafia testified, he was called to accompany Llerena and three other agents to a rural sector outside Quito, where they picked up two black plastic bags hidden in a small cave. They drove to Lake Yambo, two hours from Quito, where the agents were ordered to put stones and sand in the bags so they would sink. When Espafia opened one of the bags, he saw a human head and an arm. The agents loaded the bags into an inflatable boat, took them far out into the lake, and dumped them. On the return trip to Quito, Espafia deduced from a conversation between the other agents that they had just disposed of the remains of the Restrepo brothers. (Despite an extensive search of the lake, no bodies have yet been found.) Days later, he saw the Restrepo Trooper being dismantled in the yard of the SIC offices.
The Fall Out
A year has passed since the release of the Restrepo Commission report and Borja’s pronouncements. Of the 13 SIC officials arrested in September 1991, nine remain in custody, including Gen. Molina. Three of those released were low-level agents considered immaterial to the case. But the fourth was Col. Gustavo Gallegos, the SIC official who signed the “official” police report stating the Restrepo brothers died in a traffic accident, a story so thoroughly discredited that even Gallegos now claims he didn’t read it before signing. Interestingly, Gallegos was chief of INTERPOL in Ecuador at the time and, according to Elsie Monge of the human rights commission, he is the main contact in the country for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. “He was released because of pressure from the U.S. Embassy,” she said. “We think this maneuver is like a test balloon to gauge public reaction, because there is a lot of pressure on the courts to release the other police officials.” The dismantling of SIC was not as precipitous nor as complete as it first appeared. The Borja government had apparently been considering for some time the possibility of closing down SIC and replacing it with a judicial police force. The Restrepo case provided the final prod, or perhaps a convenient pretext, for Borja to take action. The new police force has a fresh name-the Office of Criminal Investigation (OID) and, according to its new chief, it is an armed force that is “technical, professional, well-trained, and ‘moralized.'” More than 200 former SIC agents now work at OID.
The new commission that was to investigate other human-rights violations has also faltered. “Stillborn,” says Monge, “a publicity stunt. The families had their stacks of files ready, but the commission was never constituted, it never met, and no cases were ever heard.” Supreme-court hearings begun in October, 1991 continue at a slow pace. On the advice of his lawyer, Hugo Espafia has refused to testify until his release. He argues that expanding on his previous testimony will only impli-catehimfurther. Meanwhile, the weekly demonstrations in the plaza continue, but an incident earlier this year seemed an ominous portent of the changing political climate. On January 8, police in full riot gear surrounded hundreds of peaceful supporters marking the fourth anniversary of the disappearance. The police threw tear-gas canisters into the crowd and confiscated the demonstrators’ placards and photographs.
This new wave of police repression is seen as a sign that the government is growing weary of the persistent clamor raised by the Restrepo case. Now that the rightist government of Sixto Duran
Ballee was elected in July, many expect a legal loophole will be found to allow the ten jailed police officials to go free while awaiting trial, and indeed the trial could be delayed for years.
Pedro Restrepo remains cautiously optimistic: “The court will march to a rhythm according to the pressure we put on it. In its own way, it’s moving. When people first saw us in the plaza, they thought we were crazy. ‘What can you do against the police or the state?’ they asked. I said I don’t know, but at least we are going to stick it out here. They covered it up, and we are uncovering it. And something did happen. The commission was formed, and after its report was released we began to get financial and moral support from many sectors-artists, unions, even the Quito Chamber of Commerce contributed money for the legal fund. If we keep up the same energy as the case goes through the courts, things will continue to happen.”
