Three days of bloody clashes between inmates in Ecuador have left 21 dead and 66 people injured, including five police officers, in the latest gang violence in the country’s notoriously brutal prisons, officials said Thursday.
At least five inmates died and 23 people were injured in renewed fighting on Wednesday, the country’s prison authority said. Five police officers were among the injured.
This comes after clashes on Monday and Tuesday that left 16 dead and 43 injured at another Ecuadorian prison in the central Ecuadorian city of Latacunga, some 300 kilometers (186 miles) northeast of the port city of Guayaquil.
About 900 police and soldiers were deployed to quell the revolt in Guayaquil, the prisons agency SNAI said on Twitter, while the interior ministry said the order had been “reclaimed.”
Violence in Ecuador’s prisons, where drug gangs linked to Mexican cartels struggle for power, is often perpetrated with knives and sometimes includes beheadings.
Prison riots have claimed the lives of nearly 400 inmates since February 2021.
A single riot in September last year – one of the bloodiest in Latin American history – killed 122 inmates in Guayas 1, the same section of Guayaquil prison where clashes broke out on Wednesday.
Police said Wednesday’s injuries included five of their own who “were attacked with firearms while they intervened to restore order”.
Some of the inmates were injured with “explosives,” which also resulted in structural damage to the facility, the prison authority said.
The clashes involved inmates from three of the 12 sections of Guayas 1, which houses nearly 7,000 prisoners as part of a larger complex housing more than 13,000 inmates.
Guayaquil prison is 20 percent overcrowded.
– “torture centers” –
The SNAI dispatched tactical units to restore order after Monday’s riots at Latacunga prison, which holds 4,300 inmates and is one of the largest in the country.
Further clashes broke out on Tuesday.
After Monday’s massacre, concerned relatives waited outside the prison, desperate for news of their loved ones’ fate.
“I am looking for my brother Carlos Bravo. I got here at 6am,” a whining woman, who did not give her name, told AFP on Tuesday.
After the violence, 135 Latacunga detainees were transferred to other facilities as a “security measure,” according to the SNAI.
In the past, such transfers have caused further problems as the gangsters end up in rival territory.
A government committee found in April that Ecuadorian prisons resemble “torture centers.”
Bordering Colombia and Peru, the world’s largest producers of cocaine, Ecuador has evolved from a transit point for drug shipments to the United States and Europe to a major smuggler.
The country seized a record 210 tons of drugs in 2021, the same year the homicide rate almost doubled.
Overcrowding has been alleviated somewhat from 30 percent in 2021 through the use of pardons and probation for good behavior, but remains a major problem.
To improve living conditions in prisons, President Guillermo Lasso launched an inmate census in August.
In May this year, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed “deep concern at the recurrence of prison violence” in Ecuador, underscoring “the urgent need for comprehensive reform” of the judiciary and prison systems.
For its part, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has called on the Ecuadorian government to launch an “immediate, serious and impartial” investigation.
