Forensic teams have identified 17 of the 20 bodies of the inmates murdered last Sunday in clashes between prisoners in a prison in the Andean city of Cuenca, located in southern Ecuador, the Human Rights Secretariat reported on Tuesday.
(Read: Confrontation in prison in Ecuador leaves at least 20 dead)
In a statement, he indicated that 13 bodies have already been delivered to their relatives in coffins, while work progresses to identify the remaining three bodies.
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The Secretariat has provided a total of 200 emotional support and psychological first aid services to relatives of the victims since the Sunday the crisis broke out at the Azuay No.1 Deprivation of Liberty Center.
According to the authorities, the clashes occurred between members and dissidents of the group called “Los Lobos”, and whose leaders were transferred last night to the country’s maximum security prison, known as “La Roca”, which is located in the province of Guayas (southwest).
measures from the government
They don’t sit still: they act in prisons first and then transfer their struggles to the streets, in disputes over territories, through which they can send drugs abroad.
The head of state, Guillermo Lasso, assured this Tuesday that they will strengthen prison intelligence “to avoid further events”, and described as “severe” the decision to transfer the five main leaders of the revolts to “La Roca”.
In that area of the Litoral penitentiary, the inmates in question are isolated, Lasso said, noting that, “to avoid being affected,” precautions have been taken to protect women and some prisoners who have committed minor crimes, or who are in transition. “El Turi”, the prison where the clashes took place on Sunday.
Likewise, he indicated that they will carry out a much more thorough cleaning of “weapons, explosives, materials that should not be in prisons, and that have entered as a result of corruption.” The president pointed out that the prison crisis is an “issue inherited” from other administrations and that it worsens when drug seizures deepen.
“We seized in 2021, 210 tons of drugs, and so far this year, we are already much more than 40 tons of drugs“He reported before pointing out that after this, the criminal gangs.
In the “Let’s meet for citizenship” program, in which two journalists from different media outlets interview him every week, the president asserted that his government will “strengthen the institutions that administer Ecuador’s prison system.”
And he stressed that they will do everything necessary, with the support of the United States, Colombia, the European Union, among others, to fight against criminal gangs, especially the transnational ones dedicated to drug, people and arms trafficking.
Ecuadorian prisoners in Cuenca during the riots.
FERNANDO MACHADO / AFP
Asked about the actions being carried out by the Government of El Salvador to control the violence and whether Ecuador should intensify its control actions, Lasso assured that his administration is advancing in actions “within the constitutional and legal framework of Ecuador, and within very clear norms of respect for human rights”.
Prisoners, he said, “have not lost their right to dignity. They have the right to food, to work within the prison system; (they have) the right to sports, culture, health.”
That of last Sunday is the first violent act of great magnitude this year in “El Turi”, where on February 23, 2021, 33 inmates were already murdered, most of them decapitated and dismembered, as part of a simultaneous attack coordinated by criminal gangs in different prisons that, in total, left 78 dead throughout the country.
EFE
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