Country: Ecuador
Group: Afroecuadorian
Date Finalized: 3/15/2020
Team: Rayna Castillo (lead), Sophia Agne, Kimberly Prete
Content Warning: policy brutality, slavery, physical violence, homicide, sexual assault
Approximate Time Period: 1526-1999
The long history of discrimination and human rights violations against the Afroecuadorians goes as far back as 1526, when they were brought over on slave ships to the Americas (Minority Rights, n.d.). During their forced journey to Ecuador, the Afroecuadorians experienced, “dispossession, persecution, torture, rape and genocide” (Dixon, 1977). There have also been more recent documented cases of targeted killings in the Afroecuadorian community, particularly with individual struggles with a local law enforcement officer. Dixon documents claims of an officer who had been accused of persecuting, arresting, and torturing dozens of Afroecuadorians. Along with this, many other cases have been filed in which men and women of this ethnic group were specifically targeted and abused by police and the military (Dixon, 1997). Dixon had been gathering many of these testimonies during his time in Ecuador researching these issues, so many of these specific cases took place around the 1990s. This would be an appropriate coding for targeted lethal violence: not only are Afro Ecuadorians killed because of their ethnic identity, they are also killed at the hands of those in positions of power. The data quality for this case would be a 2 because much of this information comes from multiple credible sources, but we were unable to find other examples of “targeted lethal violence” that would help reaffirm this coding.
Sources
- Minority Rights (n.d.). Afro-Ecuadorians. Retrieved February 29, 2020, from https://minorityrights.org/minorities/afro-ecuadorians/
- Dixon, David. (1997). “Race, class and national identity in black Ecuador: Afro-Ecuadorians and the struggle for human rights.” Dissertation, Clark Atlanta University