Violence once again seized Ecuador’s prisons with two massacres in just three days that left 29 prisoners murdered and 59 injured. As if that were not enough, the prison service reported last Saturday that two detainees were found dead with apparent symptoms of suffocation in a prison in the coastal province of Esmeraldas. With more than 450 prisoners killed since the beginning of 2020most of the confrontations take place between criminal gangs that dispute the internal control of the prison centers in the absence of the State.
Groups such as the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights believe that the prison labyrinth could even be classified as genocide, since the government of Guillermo Lasso has not been able to stop the massacres or the entry of weapons, ammunition and explosives into the jails. “If we look at it in terms of population per capita, Ecuador already has the largest number of murdered in Latin American prisons. According to international regulations, a State is obliged to provide security and avoid these types of events, but clearly the Ecuadorian State is not fulfilling its responsibilities,” he explained to Page 12 the director of the Andean Center for Strategic Studies (CENAE), Mario Ramos.
Self-government and abandonment
Just two days before the latest prison massacre broke out in Ecuador, UN human rights experts made a visit to the country in which they confirmed that the serious crisis in the prison system is due to state abandonment and the self-government created within the the enclosures. Ramos shares this diagnosis and adds that the “letting go, letting go” of the Lasso government is sometimes a “deliberate strategy to keep society alarmed and frightened and to have a more expeditious way to deal with issues such as the privatization of the public assets of Ecuadorians.” “.
In the prison of the Andean town of Latacunga, in the center of Ecuador, the violence that left 16 prisoners dead would have originated from the murder of Leandro Norero, a 36-year-old drug trafficker who was arrested in May and was wanted by Peru . Interior Minister Juan Zapata warned that Norero’s death could trigger new clashes between the detainees.
An assault rifle, three pistols, 45 homemade sabers and 23 other bladed weapons such as large knives was the result of the requisition carried out in the Littoral Penitentiary, the largest and most populous prison in Ecuador and the scene of another of last week’s massacres, which left 13 detainees dead. Also A police officer is being investigated for being involved in the discovery of a package with more than 700 rifle bullets in a bathroom of that prison.
From detention centers, gangs like Los Chone Killers, Los Choneros, Los Lobos and Los Tiguerones run Ecuador’s growing drug trade. Located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s largest producers of cocaine, Ecuador seized a record 210 tons of drugs in 2021. That same year the homicide rate almost doubled, closing with 14 murders per 100,000 people.
criminal organizationswho have connections with Mexican cartels, the domain of the business is disputed with blood and fire. In one massacre alone, 122 prisoners died in Guayas 1 in September 2021, one of the most atrocious in Latin America.
Lasso’s response
President Guillermo Lasso appointed Guillermo Rodríguez as the new director of the national prison service on Monday, in the midst of a prison crisis that does not seem to have a solution in the short term. “The Ecuadorian government has a passivity that borders on intention. We wonder if he is really interested in guaranteeing the rights of people deprived of liberty or if with his omissions what he is really looking for is that the massacres occur,” he warns. Vivian Idrovo Moracoordinator of the Alliance of Organizations for Human Rights in Ecuador, who contributes to this newspaper: “The State enters the deprivation of liberty centers hours after the massacres, watches how the bodies are incinerated and uses force against the families.”
Mora was in the Latacunga prison a few months ago. “I was able to see with my own eyes how the inmates were forced to collect the two hours of water they had a day in the toilets. Also that people cry out for health services and adequate and safe food. Health shifts were counted for pavilions of more than three hundred people. The women reported that they did not have health care for chronic illnesses”, explains this feminist lawyer who recalls with emotion how “a person deprived of liberty, afflicted by a catastrophic illness and unable to move, survived due to the care of his cellmates before the total absence of the state.
“Any minute, another massacre”
A pacification committee created by the government in the face of the prison crisis, which did not achieve its goal, stated in April that Ecuadorian prisons “are considered warehouses for human beings and torture centers”. For Mora, it is essential that the Ecuadorian State allocates a sufficient budget and carries out effective actions to regain control of the prisons. “In the bodies and lives of private persons, violence and the struggle between those who have or hold control of detention centers is expressed. Because it is known that there are weapons there, for example, at any time there can be a new massacre will happen,” he warns.
For Ramos, the situation in the prisons and others that are taking place in parallel in Ecuador are explained by the application of the neoliberal program of the Lasso government, which in his opinion is the continuity of the Lenín Moreno government. “It’s not about ineptitude or anything like that. The government is simply not interested in resolving or meeting citizen demands,” says the CENAE leader, who adds: “Now, in its demagogic logic, it talks about giving citizens free portability of weapons. , that is, something similar to what happens in the United States where we see that it has not served to confront violence and insecurity, quite the opposite.”