One day after the murder of the footballer Barcelona Sporting Club Mario Pineida (33) In an armed attack in the coastal city of Guayaquil, family, friends and colleagues said goodbye to him at the wake held in the Aurora Peace Park, in the Daule canton. This Friday a mass will be celebrated in his honor, also in the Aurora Peace Park, at 3:00 p.m. local time (9:00 p.m. CET). An hour later the burial will take place.
During the morning, family members and Barcelona fans approached the area around the morgue to say goodbye to the player and his partner, a 39-year-old woman of Peruvian nationality who also died in the attack. “My daughter had no enemies, she was not hiding, she had no threats,” declared the mother of the Pineida couple, who also asked for “justice” and defended that she was a “very noble” person. Club fans, like Eduardo Santander, expressed their “anger, sadness and helplessness” after what happened and assured that they would “always wear the yellow shirt.”
The coach of Barcelona Sporting Club, Ismael Rescalvo (center), attends the wake
The Barcelona Sporting Club reported that it made the Monumental Banco Pichincha stadium available to the family to host the wake, although finally the player’s relatives declined the proposal and opted to hold it in the park. Social networks were also filled with messages in memory of the left back, and even other international teams, such as Real Madrid, lamented the loss of X.
Barcelona de Guayaquil players wanted to say goodbye to ‘Pitbull’
Pineida died after receiving multiple gunshot wounds in an attack carried out in broad daylight in a busy area of Guayaquil, the most populated city in the country and one of the main focuses of the wave of criminal violence linked to organized crime that is passing through Ecuador. The Guayaquil municipal security company and the National Police reported this Thursday the arrest of an alleged person involved in the attack.
Known as ‘El Pitbull’, the 33-year-old footballer took his first professional steps in Independiente del Valle and developed a career that included stages in Brazil’s Fluminense and in Ecuadorian clubs such as El Nacional and Barcelona, a team to which he returned on several occasions.
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The crime adds to a series of armed attacks against Ecuadorian professional soccer players recorded so far this year. Among them is the murder, on September 19, of midfielder Jonathan ‘Speedy’ González, of the 22 de Julio club, which occurred in the province of Esmeraldas, on the border with Colombia, where they played in the second category.
Since 2024, Ecuador has been living under an “internal armed conflict” declared by the president, Daniel Noboa, to intensify the fight against criminal gangs, to which the Government attributes the escalation of violence that the country has recorded in recent years.
