Resting on a crest of highland overlooking Ecuador’s Pacific coast, Los Bajos is a squalid collection of rough brick homes interspersed with the occasional slot casino. A jungle-clad hill looms over the town; vultures wheel above the unlit dirt road that weaves down to it through scrubland exuding a sour stench, like that of too-fresh fertiliser. Signs warn that anyone caught dumping rubbish along the road will be subject to a $900 fine, though for the residents of Los Bajos it’s hardly the litter that’s been the problem of late. It’s the corpses.
Mercedes Morales, a 45-year-old schoolteacher and community leader, has heard the locals’ complaints. The first body, discovered two years ago, was that of a local taxi driver. Morales estimated that 20 bodies have been found along the road into Los Bajos in the past six months alone. “No, no, more bodies than that,” interjected her husband, sitting next to her on a white plastic lawn chair in their bare cement courtyard. “Too many to count.”
The pair agreed that the bodies tend to be found in the morning, by residents commuting to a nearby fish-processing factory. “They call up the police, then drive away quickly,” Morales explained. Some victims are Venezuelan migrant workers. But most are Ecuadorians, young men whom relatives can recognise at the morgue “because of their tattoos”. Often the men are long dead by the time they reach Los Bajos, having been transported in stolen vehicles that are later torched in the hills beyond town. But now and then they get murdered onsite. “We hear the gunshots in the evening,” Morales told me. Over the past year Los Bajos’s several hundred residents have adopted an unofficial curfew; they do not leave their homes after sundown or walk
beyond the town alone. | | |
