At least 62 inmates dead in Ecuador prison riots
At least 62 inmates died Tuesday and several were injured in riots blamed on gang rivalry at three jails in Ecuador’s overcrowded prison program, authorities said.
As security forces battled to regain control, distraught family waited desperately for news beyond your prison on Ecuador’s western port metropolis of Guayaquil, where officials said 21 died.
Another 33 died at the prison in Cuenca in the south and eight in Latacunga in the centre of the South American region, according to Edmundo Moncayo, director of the government’s SNAI prisons control body.
“We wish the death list directed at us,” said Daniela Soria, 29, one of about 40 women beyond your Guayaquil prison, most of them in tears.
“We find out that the problems are not over because everyone there has a cellphone and my hubby doesn’t call me personally,” she told AFP.
Earlier, she received a WhatsApp voice message from her spouse, Ricardo, which she played back again for AFP. “They will kill me, get me out of below!” he can be read exclaiming, the previous she listened to from him.
Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno, on Twitter, attributed the riots to “criminal organizations” engaged in “simultaneous acts of violence in a number of prisons.”
The authorities, he said, “are acting to retake control.”
The armed service was deployed to help police quell the uprising.
- ‘Like a market’ -
The prosecuting authority said countless inmates were remaining injured in fighting between “criminal gangs”, including two at Guayaquil in serious state.
Countless police were also hurt, said Moncayo, but no deaths have already been reported among security personnel.
Law enforcement commander Patricio Carrillo described the situation as “critical,” even while Interior Minister Patricio Pazmino created a good centralised command content to respond to what he said was first “concerted actions by criminal institutions to generate violence found in penitentiary centres.”
The prison authority described fierce fighting between organized gangs that go by names such as for example Los Pipos, Los Lobos and Tigrones. They count on medication trafficking and operate their criminal enterprises from prison.
Moncayo told reporters that on Mon, guards seized two firearms which were to be utilized to kill the first choice of an organization imprisoned in Guayaquil.
“Inside, it is just like a market. There is everything: prescription drugs, arms, even puppy dogs. Everything comes,” stated Soria, the wife of prisoner Ricardo.
So that you can reduce prisoner numbers amid the coronavirus epidemic, the federal government commuted the sentences of people convicted of minimal offences, reducing overcrowding from 42 percent to thirty percent.
This still leaves Ecuador’s prison system, with a capacity to house 29,000 inmates in 60-odd facilities, with a prisoner population of 38,000.
There are 1,500 guards to oversee them.
- Dearth of guards -
The SNAI has said a dearth of personnel “hinders immediate response” to prisoner revolts.
This past year, inmate disputes left 51 dead, in respect to police figures.
A 90-day state of emergency in the country’s jails was ordered by Moreno last year to try to get gang activity in order and decrease the violence.
But just found in December, prison unrest left 11 prisoners dead and seven injured.
Tuesday’s riots coincided with a good march of hundreds of indigenous persons on Quito to demand a good vote recount after a first round of presidential elections this month saw their candidate left out in the cold.
