Beyond one
or a few lives

The northern border had been at war for two months when the El Comercio team set out. On January 27, 2018, a bomb exploded at a police barracks in San Lorenzo, Esmeraldas. More detonations followed near a naval outpost and a military one. On March 20, an ambush in Mataje killed four marines: three at the scene and one later in the hospital. Since January, the major media outlets had been sending teams every week to cover the area. On March 26, Javier Ortega, Paúl Rivas and Efraín Segarra reached the military checkpoint in Mataje, asked whether they could cross, and the soldiers let them through. On the other side the Oliver Sinisterra Front was waiting for them, the FARC dissident group commanded by alias Guacho.

On April 2, seven days into the kidnapping, Cristian Segarra, Efraín's son, and Yadira Aguagallo, Paúl's partner, sat down with Andersson Boscán on News and Coffee. The names had been made public the day before. There was proof of life. Segarra explained that his father, 60 years old and with more than fifteen years at the newspaper, was the team's driver, and that the three had not entered through any irregular crossing: they went through where the state was. Two days later, retired intelligence colonel Mario Pazmiño analyzed on the same program the video with Guacho's demands: he wanted the three journalists swapped for three members of his gang, captured in a January 12 operation against an explosives stash.

According to Yadira Aguagallo, the government told the families there was a willingness to negotiate and that a process was under way to secure the swap of the three. The story kept changing: some days they were told negotiations were happening, other days the international media were told they were not. On April 13, 2018, the government confirmed the murder of the three. That same day, in public and in private, President Lenín Moreno met with the families and promised that all the information would be declassified. He also said a line they held on to: Ecuadorians forgive mistakes, but not lies.

On December 18, 2018, La Posta published a special report with a leaked audio recording: the voice of President Moreno, recorded inside a meeting of the Public and State Security Council, the COSEPE, during the kidnapping crisis. Forty-five seconds. Ninety-seven words. Sources who were present at the councils confirmed to La Posta that the words were spoken at one of the three COSEPE meetings held during the kidnapping. Security council meetings are top-secret information, the state's highest classification level.

The government did not react that day. It did not say at which of the three councils those words were spoken, in what context, or whether they were the state's final decision or a position that was later discussed and changed. Andersson Boscán said on air that he hoped the government would admit it was the president's voice, that it was a COSEPE meeting and that the recording was illegal, made by someone high up in the state. The date of the words mattered as much as the words themselves: whether they were said while Ortega, Rivas and Segarra were alive or when it was already known they had been murdered.

La Posta set out its editorial position on the same program. It neither defended nor attacked negotiating with Guacho: if the state decided not to negotiate with terrorists, that was its legitimate right. The problem was something else. First, that someone capable of planting a recorder on the president during a national security crisis was sitting in the upper reaches of the state, and that the recording reached a journalist when it could have reached the very group being hunted. Second, that the state told the families one thing and said another in private. Boscán asked the Attorney General's Office to request the audio from La Posta and open an investigation into who made the recording.

Yadira Aguagallo came to News and Coffee on the morning of December 19 on behalf of the Nos Faltan 3 collective. No one from the government had called the families after the publication. She described what they had been asking for over eight months: not a culprit, but a serious investigation that would examine, even if only to rule them out, possible responsibilities or omissions by state agents. On August 20, 2018, after reviewing the declassified documents handed over to the IACHR, the families sent letters to then Interior Minister Mauro Toscanini and Defense Minister Oswaldo Jarrín, requesting information from the security council meetings at which resolutions were adopted concerning their relatives. The Interior Ministry replied that it was not its responsibility and referred them to Defense. The Defense Ministry, which has custody of the council records, did not even send an acknowledgment of receipt.

The families were not asking for the city to be plastered with the three councils' records. They were asking for the minutes to reach the Attorney General's Office through regular channels and be added to the case file, and for all three to be included, not just part: the complete sequence of decisions, from the first council to the third, to find out whether an initial intention changed over the days. Aguagallo added a fact the government would have to explain: the last COSEPE of the crisis was on April 13, the day the murders were acknowledged, and by that date another Ecuadorian couple had already been held captive on the same border for two days, a kidnapping that was only announced on April 17 or 18. Ricardo Rivas, Paúl's brother, has said that if they had been told the truth about the real state of the negotiations, they would have sought other paths.

The other part of the complaint concerned the Attorney General's Office. Prosecutor Wilson Toainga was in charge of the preliminary inquiry. On July 23, 2018, the families' legal team asked that statements be taken from the news crews that had been prevented from going into Mataje, to test the official claim that there was only a nighttime curfew. The prosecutor asked them to justify why they wanted that information. Eight months after Efraín Segarra's pickup truck turned up, the fingerprints taken from the vehicle had not been analyzed: the answer was that the reagents needed to compare them did not exist in the country. The truck was returned without a chain of custody. The Attorney General's Office had not opened a line of investigation into the state's responsibility during the crisis.

In December 2019, the Special Follow-up Team of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, set up with the governments of Ecuador and Colombia, delivered its report. Cristian Segarra summed it up on December 17 on Café La Posta: an independent international body had determined that the state bore responsibility through action or omission, and that the kidnapping took place on Ecuadorian territory. That point had been a source of friction with the government. In the first meetings, the crisis committee told the families the pickup truck had been found a kilometer before Mataje, halfway between the last military checkpoint and the town. Later the story changed: the truck was on the corner by the house of Guacho's mother. The report recommended administrative reviews of the officials who handled the crisis. Segarra pointed to one: prosecutor Toainga had sat on the crisis committee and was later put in charge of investigating it.

Days after receiving the report, Foreign Minister José Valencia said the kidnapping did not happen in Ecuador and that the three journalists crossed of their own free will and without permission. Segarra responded point by point: permission to cross was requested from a senior Navy officer, who granted it, and it was recorded in the military checkpoint's logbook; no one can ask Colombia for permission when armed men force them out of their vehicle; Paúl Rivas left his camera gear in the truck, and a photographer does not go out to work without his gear. On December 16 the families issued a statement rejecting the foreign minister's remarks. The case in Ecuador was still at the preliminary inquiry stage. The Attorney General's Office had formally requested the declassification of the COSEPE information and had received no answer. In Colombia there were six people in custody, three of them already charged.

On April 9, 2025, Andersson Boscán put the question to Lenín Moreno: why he did not keep his word to release the information declared secret and classified. Moreno replied that it was the journalists' decision to accept an invitation from Guacho to interview him, and that the government never knew about that circumstance. He said they did everything possible to free them, well beyond what the law allows, but that Guacho had planned to kill them to teach Ecuador a lesson. He said he called Colombian President Iván Duque, who asked him not to do anything and promised him that Guacho would be taken out within a month at most, and that this happened in less than a month.

On declassification, Moreno said he ordered it, and that the minutes of the security session show what happened next: the representatives of the police and the Armed Forces said that releasing the information was very dangerous for the people infiltrated in the FARC, the ELN and the Oliver Sinisterra group, because they would be put at risk. Seven years later, the former president confirmed what the families suspected in 2018: the promise to declassify everything was stopped inside the state itself. The audio recordings the Attorney General's Office requested are still not public, and no one was ever identified as having recorded the president at a COSEPE meeting.