Dozens of prisoners are feared dead in Ecuador after a deadly prison riot broke out between rival drug gangs in the latest bloody episode of a wave of violence that engulfed the country’s prisons.
Forty-three inmates were confirmed dead on Monday after more than 200 police commandos regained control of the guarded wing of Santo Domingo de los Tsachilas Prison, about a two-hour drive from the capital, Quito, but the death toll is likely to rise. .
Interior Minister Patricio Carillo told reporters that most of the victims had been “executed with sharp weapons”.
It is the sixth deadliest massacre in Ecuador’s prison since early 2021, bringing the death toll to nearly 400 as violence has risen to unprecedented levels fueled by rivalry between drug gangs. More than 300 prisoners were slaughtered in the country’s prisons last year, including a massacre at Litoral Prison in Guayaquil, in which 119 prisoners lost their lives.
Horrific photos on social media show mutilated bodies scattered in the prison yard. Meanwhile, local television broadcast images that became very familiar to Ecuadorian viewers, showing dozens of relatives, mostly women, who gathered in front of the prison desperately for news about their loved ones.
“There was indeed a lot of atrocities,” Ecuadorian police chief Fausto Salinas told reporters, adding that hand grenades, machine guns, revolvers and ammunition were found in the prison. Earlier Monday, he told local television that the immediate cause of the violence was the transfer of a gang leader from another prison. “The presence of this person has created conflict and violence,” he said, criticizing the judicial authorities who ordered the transfer.
This latest massacre is the first large-scale incident of violence at the Santo Domingo prison this year. In February 2021, 33 prisoners were killed in the same prison, many beheaded and dismembered as part of a simultaneous attack coordinated by criminal gangs in various prisons that left a total of 78 dead across the country.
Analysts say the jump in prison violence began when local criminal gangs began vying to work with rival new-generation Mexican drug cartels Sinaloa and Jalisco.
Ecuador – located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest cocaine-producing countries – is a strategic smuggling route due to its long Pacific coastline and large shipping and fishing fleet.
In the first four months of this year, Ecuadorian authorities seized 85 tonnes of cocaine, twice the amount seized last year.
Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso, who was on an official visit to Israel, expressed his condolences to the families of the victims and said: “This is a deplorable result of gang violence” in a tweet.
Add Comment