The last time Verónica saw her son was December 16, 2025. She had been working at the small food stand with which she supports her family — an improvised oven and some plastic tables and chairs alongside the highway that connects Quinindé with Esmeraldas on the northern coast of Ecuador. Starting early in the day, she had watched for the military convoy transferring her son to the maximum-security prison Encuentro, which was built in the middle of a forest, some 280 miles from her home. “It was as if God wanted us to see each other, because the vehicle stopped for a moment,” she remembers.

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