In just over a year, 350 inmates have been killed in some of the worst prison killings in Latin America.
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The bloodbaths are linked in the prisons from Ecuador, revealing the government’s powerlessness to regain control of places of detention. The latest clashes between prisoners took place on Sunday in the south of the country, in Cuenca, in the prison of El Turi, where twenty prisoners were killed and some bodies were mutilated.
“General indifference”
It is the fifth episode of violence since February 2021, when a war broke out, according to the government, between gangs of drug traffickers who took control of the overcrowded prison system and which the authorities are unable to stem. The sequence repeats itself tirelessly: a shooting in the middle of the night, explosions, and dismembered bodies shocking the families of prisoners and the whole country.
Cornered by critics, right-wing president Guillermo Lasso released funds to improve security and promised an increase in the number of guards. In December, he set up a civilian commission to join in the reflection and his report is final: “ Given the conditions in which people deprived of their freedom survive, these detention centers are more like warehouses for human beings and torture centers. “. Vianca Gavilanes, lawyer for the Dignity Foundation, which defends the rights of prisoners, points to two reasons for the repetition of these crises: “ A general indifference
with regard to the lives of prisoners and a state that has forgotten ” his homeworks
” towards them. She wonders about the lack of reaction from the authorities despite warning signals about the imminence of new violence.
“Corruption in the penitentiary system”
President Lasso attributes this violence exclusively to rivalries between gangs of traffickers outside prison walls. Interior Minister Patricio Carrillo recognizes ” corruption in the prison system ” and ” the Ecuadorian State has already been humiliated by the mafias which brought weapons and explosives into the prisons themselves. He also admits that the police intelligence set up in prisons develops ” tensions “by inducing” privileges between prisoners who turn into violence ».
Ecuador’s 65 prisons house 35,000 inmates for 30,000 places despite the recent pardon of 5,000 prisoners guilty of minor offences. Ecuador seized a record 210 tonnes of cocaine in 2021 and has already confiscated more than 40 tonnes since the start of the year. Formerly a transit or storage country, Ecuador, located between Colombia and Peru, the main producers of cocaine, is now faced with large-scale trafficking via its ports on the Pacific and retail in a growing domestic market.
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