Ecuadorian police and army units pulled a 10-year-old Peruvian girl from the Indigenous settlement of Espejo on August 7, on the Río Tigre in Pastaza province, a few miles from the Peruvian border. Interior Minister John Reimberg said the operation ended a trafficking scheme that had placed her with a 50-year-old man who intended to marry her, according to the Ecuadorian government's own account of the raid. The suspect, named as Santi Cuji Washinton Favio, was taken into custody at the scene; prosecutors in both countries classify the alleged crime as "servile matrimony" — delivering a woman or girl into marriage against her will, a practice BBC Mundo examined in its coverage of the case.
Two months of tracking, and an earlier trade in the other direction
The raid followed roughly two months of coordinated work by Ecuadorian and Peruvian prosecutors and armed forces, who were already following two other suspected trafficking cases along the same frontier, according to El Telégrafo's reporting on the operation. That inquiry turned up something investigators call more troubling than a single case: about a month before this rescue, an Ecuadorian girl had been moved across the same border into Peru under similar circumstances — pointing, officials said, to an organized exchange of children between Indigenous communities on both sides. The girl told authorities she had been touched inappropriately while in the suspect's custody and is now getting medical and psychological care.
A prosecutor freed the suspect — then came under review
Favio's detention didn't last. A judge released him without charges after a hearing on flagrant-crime and formal-accusation procedures, a decision Reimberg publicly criticized within days. Ecuador's Attorney General's Office responded by opening a disciplinary review of the prosecutor who handled that hearing, identified in Peruvian coverage as Kate Alexa Torres Monsalva, to determine whether her conduct in the case warrants sanctions. Ecuador's own prosecutorial office confirmed the review is examining her actions during that hearing, while noting that prosecutors act with constitutional independence.
A problem that has not shrunk in 25 years
The case has pulled fresh attention toward how entrenched child marriage remains across the region. UNICEF's most recent tally found that 21% of women aged 20 to 24 in Latin America and the Caribbean had married or entered a union before turning 18 as of 2023 — the same share the agency recorded when it began tracking the region in 1998. Some coverage of the Ecuador case rounds that up to "one in four," which happens to match the framing UNICEF itself uses for the joint regional program it runs with UN Women and UNFPA, even though the more precise current figure sits nearer one in five. What worries specialists isn't the raw percentage so much as the flat line: Latin America is the only region in the world where the rate hasn't meaningfully budged in a quarter-century. Sub-Saharan Africa still runs higher — a decade ago the rate there was closer to four in ten, and the most recent data puts it nearer three in ten — but that region has been cutting its numbers steadily while Latin America has not.
"Because of poverty, limited access to education, few economic opportunities and exposure to violence, many girls seek security or a form of independence in these unions," Alma Burciaga González, the Latin America and Caribbean spokesperson for Girls Not Brides, told BBC Mundo.
Roots in colonial law, and bans that arrived only recently
The practice traces back centuries. Catholic canon law, which governed much of the region for generations, permitted girls to marry at 12 and boys at 14. Lorena Villavicencio, who leads Mexico's national child-protection agency, Sipinna, described that legacy bluntly to BBC Mundo: "marrying a 10-year-old is normal — that it's cultural. It isn't," she said, arguing the inherited assumption still shapes attitudes in parts of Mexico today.
Legal bans followed only in recent decades, and unevenly. Nicaragua barred marriage under 18 in 2014, El Salvador did the same in 2017, Mexico imposed a nationwide prohibition in 2019, Peru followed in 2023, and Colombia and Bolivia both passed bans in 2025. Even so, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Honduras remain the countries with the highest prevalence in the region, with more than a third of Dominican women over 20 having married or partnered before turning 18, according to national survey data compiled by Statista.
Poverty, age gaps and lingering custom
A girl in a poor, rural part of the Dominican Republic — the country with the region's highest rate — is roughly four times more likely to end up in an early union than one with schooling and financial stability, per the same UNICEF findings cited above. Separately, about one in five child brides in the region marries a man at least a decade older than her. Villavicencio tied that pattern to ideas about masculinity that make large age gaps seem socially acceptable rather than alarming. Indigenous customary law compounds the problem in some communities, she added — the Peru-Ecuador case involved a girl from a Peruvian Indigenous community, and in May 2025, a 13-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl were married in a symbolic ceremony in the Indigenous town of San Pedro Cuitlapan, in Mexico's southern state of Guerrero, an event widely covered by Mexican outlets despite a statewide ban on the practice.
What officials and advocates say could change it
UNICEF's data links child marriage to higher rates of teenage pregnancy, disrupted schooling, and greater exposure to domestic and sexual violence. Its recommended countermeasures center on keeping girls enrolled and building real alternatives to early marriage — including leadership camps and girls' clubs the agency has run in the Dominican Republic since 2017 as part of its joint program with UN Women and UNFPA. Villavicencio argues there's no silver bullet, since the drivers overlap and reinforce each other, but keeping girls in classrooms widens their options. Burciaga adds that any strategy also has to reach girls who are already married, not just prevent new cases from starting. Ecuadorian and Peruvian officials have said they'll tighten monitoring along their shared border in the wake of the Pastaza rescue.
