The number of deceased prisoners rose to 43 this Monday morning during a new riot that occurred this time in the prison of the city of Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, located in the center of Ecuadorreported the State Attorney General’s Office.
In a message on Twitter, the Prosecutor’s Office indicated that “so far there have been 43 deceased inmates,” as indicated a few minutes after the Minister of the Interior, Patricio Carrillo, reported at a press conference of 41 deceased inmates.
“Most of them, if not almost one hundred percent, can be seen with the naked eye, they were deprived of life with a knife, not with a firearm”Carrillo said at a press conference.
The minister added that most of the bodies “were exposed and attacked in the pavilions and in the cells” and specified that the recapture of 112 people deprived of their liberty, who were already outside the prison, was achieved, some by save his life and others with the intention of eloping.
The National Police and coordinated with the Armed Forces were ordered to guard the roads that connect the prison with the canton (municipality) and with the rest of the province of Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas.
Carrillo noted that the clashes in the prison, where 13 were injured (some of them seriously), occurred between a criminal organization calling itself The Wolves and another dissident criminal group, calling itself R7.
Due to the seriousness of some of the wounded, the minister did not rule out that the death toll could rise in the coming hours.
Carrillo called what happened in the Bellavista detention center “cruelty”, and pointed out that it is the same group that recently caused another confrontation in the Turi prison, in the southern Andean city of Cuenca, which left 20 prisoners dead. and at least 10 others wounded.
The minister considered that the leaders of the gangs should be subjected to more demanding disciplinary regimes.
According to the official, after the incidents, searches were carried out and they found “firearms encaletadas (hidden).”
Other matchups
In Ecuador, some 400 prisoners have died in the last two years in clashes between rival organizations linked to drug trafficking that dispute the internal control of prisons and that has ramifications inside and outside prisons, according to the authorities.
Recently, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issued a report on the prison crisis in Ecuador in which it urged the Government to regain internal control of the prisons, provide decent conditions for prisoners and develop crime prevention policies where do not prioritize incarceration.
Until the end of 2021 there were more than 36,000 inmates in 36 centers, including prisons and social rehabilitation centers, whose capacity is 30,000, although overcrowding reached 62% in prisons such as Guayaquil, the most populous in the country with 7,231 inmates and scene of the bloodiest episodes experienced last year.
To solve the prison crisis, the government of the president, Guillermo Lasso, is in the process of hiring 1,400 new prison officers, granting around 5,000 pardons to prisoners convicted of minor crimes and developing the country’s first human rights policy towards the prison population. .