-Analysis-
GUAYAQUIL — A few days ago, I was talking to my mom about the case that has shocked the world: the mass rape trial in France where Gisèle Pelicot has chosen to openly testify that her husband had drugged and raped her repeatedly for years, and invited dozens of other men to sexually assault her while she was unconscious.
While we were talking about what had happened in France, so far from Ecuador, my mom remembered that in Guayaquil, between the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a local gang known as “the rapists of the red blazer.” They didn’t belong to any organized crime syndicate, nor were they drug traffickers: they were upper-middle-class and wealthy men who drove around Ecuador’s largest city in their cars — mostly in a red Ford Bronco — looking for women to rape. They would force them into the cars and take them away to sexually assault them.
Horrified, I decided to hunt down more information. There is very little out there, but I started asking people I know and some of them remember. They operated in well-known Guayaquil neighborhood like Centenario, Urdesa, and Ceibos. Many women, like my mom, remember the fear they felt knowing they could show up anywhere at any time.
During this period, one woman told my mom — who was working with women’s rights advocacy groups — that her husband was a member of that gang. The woman said her husband not only raped her, but also exposed her to being raped by other men — just like Pelicot. She was terrified because reporting it could have led to her death.
Denial of violence
Some of those who still deny there is a plague of gender-based violence will say it happened many years ago, that these things don’t happen anymore in Guayaquil.
Bikini photos were altered using AI to create fake nudes that circulated on social media.
I wish they were right.
A few months ago, the Ecuadorian journalist Alondra Santiago had her bikini photos altered using artificial intelligence to create fake nudes that circulated on social media.
A few days ago, I read in a women’s group I’m in that there is a Telegram chat made up of men from Guayaquil “where they upload nudes of local girls.” The user who was warning about this said she had found out that photos of her friends had been shared in this chat.
On November 18, a complaint was made public against a videographer who has been collecting intimate videos and photographs of women in Guayaquil, with the intention of storing them, sharing them with his friends, and selling them. The public complaint also mentions a Telegram group where the videographer exchanged the material.
As a result of this, a user on X shared that she was a victim of something similar. “In 2021, a friend of mine asked for my email and password, and I agreed to give it to her because of the trust I had,” she wrote.
“I didn’t know that she had also been hacked from her Instagram account, they asked me for money to not publish my sexual content with my ex-husband,” she says.
She shared screenshots of what happens in that chat, based on what she managed to find out after being threatened.
In that group, there are hundreds of men — More than 1,500. They pay for photos and sexual content of women who don’t know this is happening and whose content was meant to be private.
Patriarchal pact
In March 2024, a report of rape of a minor during a trip of a Guayaquil private school was made public. Her lawyer confirmed there was a group chat where those involved in that case — students from various schools in the city — where videos were exchanged to “brag and boast that they have just raped” girls.
Why, if something like “the red blazer rapists” existed here in the city, is there so little information? Why aren’t we collectively outraged by what they did to Alondra? Why do we so quickly forget the complaint of the abused minor’s lawyer? How is it possible that chats of this type exist and that dozens of men are part of them?
The patriarchal pact is the complicit silence that perpetuates misogynistic violence
Ultimately, the reason these atrocious things continue to happen, most of all with such impunity, has to do with the patriarchal pact.
When we talk about gender-based violence, the patriarchal pact is the complicit silence that perpetuates misogynistic violence. According to Spanish philosopher Cecilia Amorós, this pact is interclass, meaning it operates among men regardless of their social status. And the women are the “pacted ones.”
Naming names
Responding to that pact is evident in small actions, like laughing at sexist jokes or not talking about certain things because it’s a “private matter”; and in bigger ones, like not naming those we know to be perpetrators, thinking that if a woman reports being a victim of violence, “both sides should be heard,” pretending not to notice, or not confronting a friend who sends a photo of a woman knowing that she hasn’t consented.
Participating in the patriarchal pact is, even if you’re not part of such a chat, if you stay silent knowing it exists.
The patriarchal pact exists in France, where dozens of men raped Pelicot and others who didn’t accept, kept silent. But it is also in Guayaquil, where we live and condemn horrors related to drug trafficking, theft, and violent deaths, yet we look the other way when someone we know consumes nudes of women who have not given their consent for it.
In Guayaquil, complicity and patriarchal silence allow attacks against women to continue happening.
Some say they don’t understand why feminists criticize some men if “we protect them.”
From whom? That is the question.
