Police fight for control of Ecuador prison after massacre leaves 116 inmates dead

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Some 400 Ecuadorian police were battling Thursday (30) for control of a prison in the port of Guayaquil where a riot left at least 116 inmates dead, six of them decapitated, in one of the worst prison massacres in Latin American history.

On Tuesday, the riot began when inmates from rival gangs with links to Mexican drug trafficking clashed with firearms.

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The toll so far is 116 dead and 80 wounded, reported President Guillermo Lasso, who went to Guayaquil on Wednesday and declared a state of emergency throughout the Ecuadorian penitentiary system.

According to local website Primicias, the riot began when prisoners from one gang celebrated the birthday of one of their detained leaders and boasted of having power in prison. This upset other rival organizations located in other wings and sparked the clashes.

“Around 400 police officers carry out an intervention and search operation inside #CPLGuayas No. 1, to maintain order and guarantee security in prison,” the police said on its Twitter account. Two agents were injured.

AFP journalists reported that tanks and military personnel are stationed around the prison, where hundreds of family members desperately seek information about their relatives.

“It is excruciating. (…) They say that there are people who have taken their heads off,” Juana Pinto, who is impatiently waiting to know the fate of her imprisoned son, told AFP.

“With all these things that are happening, it is something very painful; there are many dead, many wounded, we don’t know if my son will be well or bad,” she added.

“For us relatives, it is something horrible. (…) We don’t know what to do. We feel helpless not to help them,” said Cecilia Quiroz, a relative of another inmate. “We want the government to help us,” she pleaded.

THEY ARE STRONGER

Ecuador has been suffering a prison crisis for several years with prison overcrowding of 30%, lack of guards, corruption, and violence. Before this riot, the number of prisoners killed since January was 120, and now there are already 236.

In 2020 there were 103 murders in Ecuador’s prisons, according to the National Ombudsman’s Office.

In February, 79 inmates died in simultaneous riots in four prisons in three cities, including Guayaquil.

A large prison complex in this southwestern port holds a third of the country’s 39,000 inmates, guarded by 1,500 guards (3,000 fewer than necessary, according to experts). Images circulated of decapitated, dismembered, and incinerated bodies.

“In Latin America, we, unfortunately, became the country with the largest prison massacre in recent years, more than Brazil and Venezuela,” Ecuadorian security and drug trafficking expert Freddy Rivera told AFP.

Criminal groups “have taken over the country’s prisons and are trying to send a message to the state that they are stronger than the rule of law. The prison system has collapsed,” said lawyer Itania Villarreal, former director of the agency in charge of prisons.

The director of the governmental Center for Strategic Intelligence, Fausto Cobo, admitted that the massacres in the prisons are “a threat against the State” since those responsible have “a power equal or superior to the State itself”.

WAR FOR POWER

The state of emergency in prisons decreed by the president empowers the government to suspend prisoners’ civil rights and use public force to restore normality.

The recent massacre originated in power struggles between criminal gangs at the service of international drug trafficking. According to police reports, two of them, with some 20,000 members, have links to Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels.

Rivera, a professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flacso) in Quito, noted that the prisoners also have links to criminal organizations in Colombia. He asserted that Ecuador’s prisons had become “criminal headquarters” from where criminal activities are planned, articulated, corrupted, and ordered.

He pointed out that the “war” for power is because Ecuador, with 65 prisons and where a third of the prison population is related to drug trafficking, is “strategic” for criminals because it has a dollarized economy, as well as five seaports.

Rivera said that there is also “an enormous institutional weakness in Ecuador, permeated by corruption and the infiltration of organized crime into security, justice, and prison institutions,” Rivera said.

Between January and August 2021, Ecuador seized 116 tons of drugs, primarily cocaine, compared to a record 128 tons in 2020.

Source: AFP