The security forces during an operation in the Pichincha 1 prison after the riot that broke out on November 18. /
Retired Police Colonel Santiago Loza was riddled with shots when he was driving his vehicle in Quito by a group of unknown people who were traveling on a motorcycle
The director of a prison in Ecuador, which two weeks ago was the scene of a massacre between prisoners who are fighting for control of drug trafficking, died this Thursday in an attack in Quito, reported the state agency in charge of prisons (SNAI). Retired Police Colonel Santiago Loza “has been the victim of a deadly attack,” the entity said in a statement.
Loza, who was murdered in a hit-and-run style on a peripheral road in Quito, took over on November 9 as director of the capital’s Pichincha 1 prison, which houses some 1,300 inmates. Ten inmates died on the 18th of the same month in that same penitentiary, in the middle of a confrontation that broke out after the transfer of inmate leaders to a maximum security prison in Guayaquil (southwest).
“We repudiate this cowardly act committed in the midst of the transformation process, which we have undertaken as an institution, for the security and control of prisons,” added the SNAI. Police reported that, according to witnesses to the crime, Loza was riddled with bullets when he was driving a car by people on a motorcycle.
The vehicle “was approached by other subjects, the same ones who would have fired firearms,” Freddy Sarzosa, national head of the Crimes Against Life Directorate, told the press in general. Gangs linked to drug trafficking wage a war for power inside and outside the prisons. More than a dozen massacres, the last one in Pichincha 1, have taken place in various penitentiaries in Ecuador since February last year, leaving some 400 prisoners dead. Some have become among the worst in Latin America.
After Loza’s murder, the director of the SNAI, Guillermo Rodríguez, called for the unity of all state institutions against crime. “Today is the time for the whole world to align,” said the official in a statement released by the organization. “Do we want a country bowed to crime, to drug trafficking, to violence or do we want a country that can have a good future?” He added.
Increase in violence due to drug trafficking
Ecuador, located between Colombia and Peru, the largest cocaine producers, faces an increase in violence unleashed by drug trafficking, including the death of prosecutors and police officers. In 2021, the country seized the annual record of 210 tons and so far this year the seizures have reached some 170 tons.
The SNAI recruited around 1,500 new prison guards on Monday to reinforce surveillance in overcrowded Ecuadorian prisons. “We are almost doubling the human resources required for professional, serious, and technical management of all detention centers in Ecuador,” President Guillermo Lasso said at the time. Now “we have an overcrowding of 6% compared to 26% at the beginning of my government”, in May 2021, added the conservative president. The country’s prisons have a capacity for about 30,200 inmates.
Faced with an offensive by criminal organizations, which at the beginning of November blew up car bombs, Lasso decreed a state of emergency in three of the 24 Ecuadorian provinces that are the most affected by violence. This measure, which will last until mid-December, allowed the government to mobilize the military to the streets of the provinces of Guayas, Esmeraldas and Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas (with six of the 18 million inhabitants of the nation) and order a night curfew.