The purchase of prison ships to locate the leaders of the gangs that operate in the country's penitentiary centers 80 miles in the Pacific was a campaign promise of President Daniel Noboa, who has already said that he has seen three barges that could reach Ecuador within seven or eight months. Although this was the most advertised security measure during his campaign, he now recognizes that it is not the solution to the serious situation the country is going through. “They are a complementary and provisional measure to segment and remove prisoners who are real threats to citizen and country security and keep them isolated until the maximum and super maximum security prisons are completed,” Noboa said at the beginning of December. Just a few days later, a new announcement was made: in January, construction will begin on two maximum and super maximum security prisons like the ones Nayib Bukele has built in El Salvador.
Two months after Noboa came to power, with historic levels of insecurity reaching 40 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, the security and penitentiary policy he called Plan Fénix has become known in dribs and drabs, through the few interviews that the president has given to some media. Since December 11, EL PAÍS requested an interview with a representative of the Ministry of Government and it was not granted.
That the State takes control of the prisons, where there are 31,300 people imprisoned, is part of the security strategies that the last three governments have promised without success. Until now, it has not been possible to break the direct link between prisons and the violence that worsens every day in the streets. From there the leaders of the criminal gangs direct and order hitmen, attacks, extortions and move the logistics for drug trafficking, under the protection of the State, which is responsible for the country's penitentiary centers that are guarded by police, military and civilians. . An example of this is the crime of the former presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, which was ordered from the Cotopaxi prison, according to the first investigations by the Police. The order was also issued from the Litoral Penitentiary to carry out a wave of bomb attacks simultaneously that caused 24 hours of terror in Guayaquil in November 2022.
In penitentiary centers, the strings of corruption in the judicial system also move so that judges and prosecutors rule in favor of some prisoners who seek benefits such as choosing the prison where they want to be, bringing in weapons, drugs, communication equipment, a gym and even chickens. fight.
The purpose of the prison barges, according to the Government, is to separate the leaders of the criminal gangs that operate in the penitentiary centers and isolate them from any communication input that they currently use freely in the country's prisons. The prison ships that the Noboa Government has seen have the capacity to house up to 400 people and would cost about eight million dollars. “A barge can arrive in seven or eight months, depending on how far away it is. Many of the barges are not operational or are not autonomous, they have to be towed by another ship,” explained the president, who pointed out that those that are identified are those from Australia, the United Kingdom and another that is in the United States.
For security analyst Luis Carlos Córdova, the announcement to bring barge prisons “is another patch measure to the country's serious insecurity problem.” The Noboa Government, he says, “is not clear how to put into practice many of the ideas that it formulated during the campaign.” Furthermore, for these prisons to operate, legal changes should be made, such as “creating a system of permanent state of exception, which is exactly what El Salvador has with the Bukele model, and which has allowed all types of human rights guarantees to be violated.” for those who are detained,” explains Córdova.
But before the barges arrive, two maximum and super maximum security prisons are supposed to be ready, like the “Terrorism Confinement Center” inaugurated by the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, in February 2023. “ We have already finished the conversations with international groups that built the prisons in El Salvador and Mexico and with that we will lay the first stone in January,” said Noboa in one of his last interventions. The first two prisons should be in place in 200 days maximum, according to the Government's schedule, without specifying how much they will cost or where they will be built.
The Minister of Government, Mónica Palencia, gave other details on the Ecuavisa channel of what those two prisons would be like, which she assured would have “super-mega security” in technology, and not necessarily in terms of their size. The technical standard, according to Palencia, establishes that a supreme security prison cannot hold more than 35 people. “We are going to have two specific prisons and other maximum security prisons,” she added. It will be the same as that of El Salvador because the Government has ensured that it will be “the same people, the same designers, the same company.” “It is Israeli cooperation in the design of maximum and supermax prisons and the segmentation for minor crimes and contraventions. It is a system that was not invented by Bukele, but came from Mexico, and before then they achieved it in Thailand, in Singapore. Then it was Mexico, El Salvador and now Ecuador would have it,” said Noboa.
Ecuador already has a maximum security prison called La Roca, which is within the Penitenciaría del Litoral complex in Guayaquil, which remained closed for six years and was renovated in 2022 to keep the leaders of criminal gangs isolated. The problem, therefore, is not only one of infrastructure, but of how organized crime is embedded in the judicial system. The evidence of this was how alias Fito, from the Los Choneros criminal gang, who was transferred to La Roca, was not there for more than a month because a judge ordered that he be returned to his stronghold, the Regional prison where he has remained with privileges for 10 years of confinement.
“The main challenge is to stop the tremendous degree of involvement of criminality in State institutions,” says Córdova, “today we know from the Prosecutor's Office that there are police generals working for different criminal gangs and it is too naive on the part of the Government to believe that they are to solve the problem with more prisons, when they should first make a policy that reviews the internal control mechanisms,” he adds.
Ecuador has 20 prisons throughout its territory, which house 31,300 people, although their capacity is for 27,500, which means that there is 13% overcrowding. Another of the Government's purposes is to reduce overcrowding. Noboa said that one thousand foreigners who are detained with sentences in prisons qualify to be expelled from the country immediately.
“If one of the underlying problems is overcrowding, how does building two super prisons for 35 people each solve the problem?” refutes Fernando Bastidas of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, who adds that it is an anti-technical decision because if they hope to lock up the ringleaders in those prisons, “in the logic of organized crime it has been proven that once they arrest one leader, ten more appear,” he adds.
But the secrecy surrounding the Government's security plan deepens the uncertainty of whether violence will be controlled in the country where businesses must pay extortion to operate, where classes are interrupted by shootings, and where there are 21 cr
imes every day. .
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