At least 44 inmates on Monday died in Ecuador’s latest prison riot, the public prosecutor said, as another 100 prisoners managed to escape.
Authorities said that a fight broke out between the rival Los Lobos and R7 gangs inside the Bellavista Prison in Santo Domingo de los Colorados, about 80km from the capital, Quito.
During the riot, dozens of inmates tried to escape, with Police Chief Fausto Salinas telling reporters that 108 remained missing after another 112 escaped prisoners were recaptured.
Photo: Reuters
The South American country’s prison authority, SNAI, said that it has activated security protocols to contain the “disturbances to order.”
Six gang leaders were transferred from Bellavista Prison to two maximum security prisons, the Ecuadoran Ministry of the Interior said.
Ecuadoran Minister of the Interior Patricio Carrillo had initially said authorities were in control of the situation and that all escaped prisoners had been recaptured.
Inmates with facial injuries were taken by truck and ambulance to medical facilities, while family members of those incarcerated gathered at the prison looking for information, reporters at the scene said.
Previously, about 350 inmates had been killed in five prison riots since February last year.
Just last month, at least 20 inmates died inside the El Turi Prison in Cuenca, southern Ecuador.
Ecuadoran President Guillermo Lasso said that the problem inside the facilities mirrors that outside, where drug gangs are vying for control of trafficking routes.
Those rivalries among inmates sometimes explode into violence, with some prisoners hacked to death or beheaded with machetes.
“The majority of victims, if not almost 100 percent, were killed with knives and not guns,” Carrillo said. “Their mutilated bodies were left where they were.”
The prisoners were killed in their cells and common rooms, after which inmates then used guns to try to escape from the facility.
Authorities said they would conduct a search for weapons and transfer gang leaders to a different prison in Guayas Province.
“This is the unfortunate result of gang violence,” Lasso, who was on a state visit to Israel, wrote on Twitter, as he expressed “condolences to relatives” of the victims.
Even with greater investment in the prison system, the creation of a commission to pacify facilities and new policies, such as the holding of the most dangerous prisoners at a single penitentiary, have not reduced the violence.
Overcrowding is another common problem, with 35,000 detainees in 65 prisons that only have the capacity to house 30,000 inmates.
The 1,200-capacity Bellavista Prison houses 1,700 inmates.
Ecuador has also seen a rise in street crime and drug trafficking, which the government has tried to tackle by declaring a state of emergency in the three worst affected provinces: Guayas, Manabi and Esmeraldas.
The country last year seized a record 210 tonnes of drugs and has seized another 82 tonnes this year.
Ecuador, which borders the world’s two largest producers of cocaine, Colombia and Peru, is often used as a jumping off point to export the white powder to the US and European countries.
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