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.
