María and Mayra both say that the beginning of the school year is the hardest time. María had to move her four grandchildren to a public school. The quality of education in Ecuadorian public schools is notably terrible, and even the poorest citizens will scrimp and save to send their children to a private school. Mayra had to accept charity in order to buy the uniform and the school supplies for her daughter.
According to attorney Roberto Malagón, the judge ordered each of those convicted to pay fifteen thousand dollars in restitution, but the ruling has never been formalized. So, María and Mayra wait.
Minister of the Interior María Paula Romo defended the actions taken by the local police on October 16, 2018. “All proper procedures were followed,” she said in an interview a few weeks later. “It was an unforeseeable situation.”
When questioned as to why the ministry doesn’t publicize crime statistics for each of the small towns so that resources could be more efficiently utilized, Romo stated that she was going to work to make a change in the system but quickly followed that statement with this confusing and self-serving one: “Two-way work is very important in terms of responsibility. When these figures are used in a spirit of scandal, there is a conflict like the one we are living in Posorja. We are interested in publishing the figures with an appropriate reading. We are committed, since I arrived at the interior ministry, to incorporate more data to assess the level of conflict in an area, such as the number of calls received by ECU 911.”
Romo’s words largely fell on deaf ears in the community.
A little more than a year later, it is difficult to find physical evidence of what happened in Posorja on that awful day. A woman sells shoes out of her car in front of the police station, drawing a long line of pre-Christmas shoppers. A man repairs his motorcycle on the sidewalk in front of a parts store. A small black dog dozes in the shade of a utility box, escaping the midday heat. The fishing fleet is in, and vendors hawk fresh shrimp, conchas, and corvina, while the frigate birds gather overhead and swoop down to grab up any stray morsel.
But the memory of that day is never far from the surface. Jefferson Paéz, a young patrolman, remembers how he and his fellow officers at first merely locked the door to the station when the crowd began to form, thinking it was just another protest demonstration (something that happens with frequency throughout Ecuador).
“They threw gasoline on the door and set it afire. When the glass shattered, they rushed in and took the prisoners. They weren’t in a cell; they weren’t even in handcuffs because they were waiting to be sent to Guayaquil.” Jefferson—who, because of his rank, isn’t allowed to carry a handgun—cowered behind a desk and watched as his best friend (another patrolman) was hit across the back of his head with an iron bar.
What happened that afternoon was a tragedy and one would hope that lessons were learned from it. One would, unfortunately, be wrong. The tradition of “Indigenous Justice” or “People’s Justice,” whatever it is called, lives on throughout Latin America. Neither Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch tracks these linchamientos (lynchings), but a 2015 study by the INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) indicates that such incidents in Guatemala and Bolivia (the two countries with the highest indigenous population) increased nearly tenfold since 2004. Mexico and Peru also experienced marked increases.
The study goes on to say that Colombia and Ecuador—once at or near the top of the list—have now, due to “better police response time and stiffer criminal penalties,” experienced dramatic improvements.
Ecuadorians, though, distrust scholarly studies and statistics as much as they do the justice system. Edison Segreda, over the clatter of his 125cc motorcycle-taxi engine, tells a story of a similar occurrence in a small town on the peninsula just recently. He claims that a young man attempted to steal a pickup truck and was caught, taken to a dirt road outside of town, and brutally murdered.
Details of this particular crime have not been verified; in fact, it may not have happened at all. Still, Edison believes it and sees nothing wrong about it.
“The police are lazy, stupid, and corrupt,” he says. “Until that changes…” He shrugs and extends his hands, palms up, out in front of him.
At a memorial service for the three victims, pastor Fausto Gonzaléz used his pulpit to read aloud an account of the number of unsolved cases in the area involving child abduction.
“In this country,” said Gonzaléz, “there is no confidence that the authorities will achieve justice, and the people, with troubled hearts, take justice into their own hands.”
In 1921, when most fifteen-year-old boys were either in school, working to support their families, or hanging out with their friends, Harold Jones was on his way to becoming famous. For murdering two little girls.
The eldest of four children, Harold was born in January 1906 in Abertillery, a poor Welsh mining town fourteen miles north of Cardiff. In 1843, major industry came to the town with the sinking of the area’s first deep coal mine at Tir Nicholas Farm, Cwmtillery. Abertillery developed rapidly from a farming town to a center of the South Wales Coalfield. In the 1901 census, the population stood at nearly twenty-two thousand, and reached almost forty thousand by the 1930s. Like many of the men in the area, Harold’s father, Phillip, was a coal miner, and his mother a housewife.
In school, Harold was popular and very good at sports, with aspirations to become a professional boxer. He spent much of his spare time reading or playing the organ at church services. He didn’t fit the classic profile usually found in the childhoods of those who grow up to kill: he didn’t torture animals, start fires, or wet the bed, and he wasn’t abused by his parents or bullied by his peers. He was an ordinary boy with friends, a job, and a girlfriend. At fourteen, he left school and went to work for Mortimer’s Stores, an oil-and-seed merchant close to where he lived. He did this to help support his family financially. This was common in small Welsh mining towns, where life was hard and money was scarce. (Our grandfather was removed from school by his parents when he was fourteen and sent to work in the sawmill.) Harold was punctual, worked hard, could manage the shop by himself, and was well-liked by customers. Despite his young age, he was the ideal employee.
But he had a darker side.
On February 5, 1921, eight-year-old Freda Burnell was sent by her father, Frederick (Fred) George Burnell, to Mortimer’s Stores to buy bags of grit and poultry spice for her family’s livestock. Their house at 9 Earl Street was 375 yards from Mortimer’s Stores, located at 90 Cwm Street (now Somerset Street). She left at 9:05 a.m. and should have returned shortly. When she hadn’t returned after an hour, her worried parents went looking for her, first heading for Mortimer’s Stores, where she was last seen. Harold Jones told them she had visited the store at 9:05 a.m. and he had sold her a bag of poultry spice, but since they only had loose grit, not bags, Freda left to ask her father if loose grit would suffice.
She wasn’t seen again.
Fred Burnell went to the town crier, who announced the girl’s disappearance. Police were informed at one o’clock that afternoon. The station was forty yards from the store. By three o’clock, the police had launched a missing persons search. Harold told the police the same thing he’d told Freda’s parents.
In the evening, the police asked the cinema to put Freda’s description on their screen. It read: “She was last seen wearing a red serge cap with blue velvet underneath, a brown coat, a blue turnover with white stripes, a brown jersey, new combinations [Victorian undergarment consisting of a camisole bodice attached to long drawers], black stockings and black buttoned boots. Her hair was tied up in rags and she was carrying a small chocolate-colored bag of American