Drug traffickers groom children as young as 10 at "school of assassins" in Ecuador

When Luis Sarmiento and his grandson went out early to buy bread one morning in March, they came across a shocking scene: A macabre message left by Ecuador's drug traffickers in the form of two headless bodies.

"I covered my grandson's eyes, went upstairs, and I don't know anything else," recalled Sarmiento, a 78-year-old former laborer who has lived in the Duran municipality -- near Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city -- for 16 years.

Drug traffickers have long targeted this hilly area to groom young recruits at their "school of assassins," a retired police chief told AFP under condition of anonymity.