At least 15 prisoners dead and 14 injured in a new riot in Ecuador’s largest prison

At least 15 prisoners died and another 14 injured is the preliminary result of the new incidents recorded in the early hours of this Tuesday in the Litoral Penitentiary, the largest prison in Ecuador, located in the city of Guayaquil.

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The National Service for Comprehensive Attention to Persons Deprived of Liberty (SNAI), the State penitentiary unit, stated in a statement that The Security Block, made up of the Police, the Armed Forces and the Ministries of the Interior and Defense, currently has absolute control of the penitentiary center.

The Litoral Penitentiary is the largest prison in the Guayaquil prison complex, a set of five prisons where around 12,000 prisoners are held and which in previous years has been the scene of the worst massacres among inmates recorded within the wave of criminal violence. in which Ecuador is located since the end of 2020.

The new massacre in the prison occurs while preparations are advancing for the XXIX Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government, which will take place between November 14 and 15 in the Andean city of Cuenca under the motto ‘Innovation , inclusion and sustainability’, where there is already an extensive security operation, with armed soldiers who walk the streets of the city.

Ecuador’s prisons have been under military control since last January when President Daniel Noboa declared the internal armed conflict against criminal groups.whom he began to call “terrorists” and to whom the massacres that occurred in prisons in recent years are attributed.

Among the most recent violent events linked to prisons is the murder, last September, of María Daniela Icaza, director of the Litoral Penitentiary, which occurred a few days after the murder of Alex Guevara, director of the prison in the city of Lago Agrio. , in the country’s Amazon.

More than 500 prisoners have been murdered in Ecuador’s prisons between 2021 and 2023, most of them in a series of prison massacres due to clashes between rival criminal gangs.

During 2023, nearly 70 violent deaths were recorded in Ecuador’s prisons, the largest being a riot in the Litoral Penitentiary that left 31 dead in three days.

Ecuador is going through an insecurity crisis that has placed it as the Latin American country with the highest homicide rate, registering 47.2 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023.

The wave of murders has also claimed the lives of other prison directors, as well as authorities in the judicial apparatus such as prosecutors and municipal authorities, including several mayors, in addition to the murder in August 2023 of the then presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio.

As a result of this phenomenon, and following the assault by a group of armed men on the TC Televisión channel and a series of simultaneous riots in several prisons accompanied by other acts of violence in the streets, the president, Daniel Noboa, raised the fight against organized crime to the category of “internal armed conflict.”

With this, he classified the criminal gangs as terrorist groups and decreed a series of states of exception where, among other measures, he militarized the prisons that were controlled by these organized crime structures.

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