Day 109 - Blood money?

Cuenca

The police were to pick us up at 7.30am as K had an appointment with an ear/nose/throat specialist at the hospital at 8am. By around 7:40am no-one had shown (we had half expected this) so we walked to the police station. We were worried that we would miss our appointment so we tried to persuade the police to take us immediately, but we were pretty much ignored. Around 8am we were told to get in the police car, we thought we were finally going to the hospital, instead we were taken to another police building .... this was getting ridiculous!

We finally arrived at the hospital around 8:30am, but by then the queue was huge, even with police "assistance" K couldn't be seen until 10:30am, The specialist examined K (with three policeman in attendance as well - great respect for patient privacy) and reviewed the X-rays, confirming that there was a fracture, but also that surgery wasn't required .. phew!

If you look hard enough you can see her fat lip too

On the way out of the hospital we were lucky to meet a Texan Spanish teacher who stayed with us for about a hour and helped with translation, he managed to convince the police that as we now hadn't had a decent meal for 36 hours we should at least be given a chance to get some lunch.

Back at the police building (with our Texan friend) we were taken to the forensic doctor for another examination and report. All this time it was implied to us that this was all too difficult and was taking too long and we should forget about it. M was in continual phone and email contact with the Australian consulate (based in Guayaquil) - at one point the consul spoke to one of the policemen and told them that they were keeping an eye on the case. It seemed from that point that the attitude of the police may have changed a little - but they were still quite unfriendly with us and seemed to have no concern for what had happened, we seemed to be an annoyance more than anything else.

We knew that something was supposed to happen at 3pm - from what we could work out the case was going before a judge. At 1pm we were told by the police that if we wanted to proceed with the charges we needed a lawyer, as this was a private affair, not a public case! M got onto the phone and email to try to arrange a lawyer, unfortunately the leads provided by the consulate weren't suitable, either the calls weren't answered, or the lawyers didn't speak English .... great!

We asked the police for assistance in getting a lawyer, they then drove us to the courthouse and left us sitting there wondering what was going on. Finally around 2:30pm a young woman approached us with excellent English  - she was the lawyer who had been assigned to our case - thanks Cristina!

This is where the negotiation phase started. We received a little more information about the assailant - he suffered from schizophrenia, he had "escaped" from home after missing his medication, and had 56% mental capacity. We were offered US$500 to drop the charges, but we explained that the money wasn't the issue, we said we wanted him to be off the streets and to receive treatment. We were told this was not the way the system worked, a deal needed to be struck as someone had to pay. His mother looked to be in her 60's, the average wage in Ecuador is only $300 a month, and we didn't feel we could make this woman pay any more for the misfortune of her son's illness (Cristina later told us she wanted to kill us for refusing the money - this is not the way the system works).

The case was finally seen at 6:30pm, in a small courtroom. K had the chance to say a few words, she told the judge that one punch could kill so next time he might kill someone - interestingly his lawyer nodded in agreement while this was said. The assailant who was constantly referred to as "the man that broke your nose" was sent to a psychiatric hospital for 20 days, after which he was not to be released into the public without supervision.

After all this we were pretty exhausted, we took a taxi to the plaza and finally managed to get the meal we had tried to go out for almost 24 hours earlier. We felt we had done as much as we could to stop this from happening to someone else, if we hadn't followed through (or if we'd accepted the money) the attacker would have just been released immediately without charge and gone back home to potentially do this to someone else.

After all this K surprisingly doesn't look that bad, more like she has just had a bad Botox treatment (due to the swelling). Horses have done worse things to her, so this could be considered minor in comparison.