For three years and two months since her son was detained, Lucía is also a prisoner. Not in the cell where the prisoners are crammed, with their torsos naked and sweaty from the humidity of Guayaquil. In that inhospitable place they serve their sentence. Not her, she does it from the outside, at the door of the most dangerous prison in the country, the Penitentiary, where two of her six children are held. It is another hot night in this city open to the sea, the atmosphere is thinned by the dust raised by the buses and trucks when they speed along the road. In the middle of the darkness, Lucía and nine other women light themselves with cell phone flashlights. They take out some colored sheets from their bags and spread them on the cement of the dirty sidewalk where a few hours before, street vendors were installed offering all kinds of sweets, breads, coconut water, sodas and sweets. The ten women are united by the mistakes of their relatives, a sentence and the uncertainty of not seeing them for almost six months.
They will not sleep in their beds, they guard the prison door because they found out that the military who have been in charge of the prisons since January, by a presidential mandate, will allow them to bring in medications for the detainees. “There are many patients with tuberculosis and skin diseases,” says Lucía. She is distraught because they haven’t asked for a prescription for it. Instead, they have bought all kinds of vitamins to help them boost the body’s defenses. They have also packed alcohol, some pills for stomach infection, fever and pain. The military order is that they keep all medications in a transparent plastic case, with a photograph of the detained person, with the name and identification number written on the back. None of them is sure that the medicines will actually reach the hands of her family. And they think about what they had to do to buy them. They have borrowed from relatives, neighbors or chulqueros (lenders). They have sold food in the neighborhood or organized bingos to raise money to buy medicine.
The women share the food they brought, they tell each other stories and at times laughter is heard, a natural camaraderie between people who spend so much time together. “The first times we met were protesting right here about the torture that is happening inside,” says Lucía, who remembers that on one occasion the police reacted by pushing them out of the door. “But here we are still more united,” she adds. They have become friends in misfortune. The women sit on the floor and share the information they have obtained from a prisoner who was released. A month ago, a boy who was a ward companion of María’s husband came out with a message for her: “Help him, he was sick, with fever and pimples on his body.” The man is sentenced to 20 years for murder. His face immediately turns sad when he remembers that day. “We were at a dance and a guy tried to surpass our 15-year-old daughter,” says María. “My husband reacted, but the boy took a knife and tried to stab him, but my husband moved and in a maneuver, in the middle of the fight, he stabbed the boy with it and he died.” He has already served more than three years of his sentence. He has escaped dying in the six prison massacres that have occurred in that same prison, when the gangs had control of the cell blocks and punished any mistake with blood. Despite having gone through that barbarity, María felt in her husband’s voice the last time they spoke a month ago, that he would not resist the mistreatment that he receives daily. “He told me that he believes he is going to die, to take care of the children, to be strong.” That last word broke Maria.
“We are dead in life,” Lucía intervenes, and adds: “What happens inside, we suffer outside.” She also has her story behind her. Her first son, who has been in prison for three years and two months, was sentenced for the theft of a cell phone and her second son entered a few months ago. She asked so much for a miracle and stood at the door of the Penitentiary to insist to know something about them, one day they let her go to the office where they give information and she saw her second child. “When I saw him I almost couldn’t recognize him because of how thin he was,” she says. “I was walking slowly towards the polyclinic, when he called me and I was able to hug him.”
That women take charge of caring for detainees has become a norm. According to a diagnosis of Ecuador’s prison system, carried out by Kaleidos in 2021, 85% of family members surveyed are women. In 40% of cases they correspond to the wife, wife or partner of the person deprived of liberty. In 21% of cases it is the mother who visits them and only 4% the father. This situation causes greater precariousness in the lives of women and their families. On average, until before the militarization of prisons, a woman paid up to $250 a month for the security of prisoners, for them to be able to make calls, to buy hygiene products and for the commissary, which is the prison pantry. Now they don’t pay for security, but they do pay for everything else. When they do the math, they don’t understand how they get the money to buy all that, because the average income reported by the women surveyed was $282, well below the basic salary. So in the vast majority of cases they resolve by going into debt.
The impact on emotional health is another blank bill. Families go through constant states of alarm due to the information that circulates through social networks and because they do not trust the official version of the SNAI, which is the Government entity responsible for prisons. From this abandonment of the State, this group of women was born who sacrifice their health to be there. Like Rocío who will spend the night awake with a holter who investigates if you have problems with blood pressure. Her partner next door has her left arm immobilized due to a fracture. She doesn’t seem to care as much as delivering the medications. They place their backs against the metal fences that surround the path where they will stand vigil. It’s a quiet night, considering the dangerous place they are in. They confess that they are not unaware of the control that the military has achieved in the prisons. “What we don’t understand is the need to mistreat them,” says Lucía. “I’m not going to leave them alone, their mother will be out here fighting for them.”
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