Ecuador will build two maximum security prisons in the Amazon and the Pacific coast in the style of the one built by the Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele in his war against gangs, President Daniel Noboa reported this Thursday.
“They are prisons to have segmentation, adequate isolation of people,” Noboa said in a radio interview.
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The president had said in December that he would hire the same company in charge of building prisons in El Salvador during the Bukele government.
They are “equal because it is the same company, the same design that he made (for) the prisons in Mexico and El Salvador. For all Bukele lovers it is an equal prison,” said the president.
The first stone of these constructions will be laid on January 11. The prisons will be located in the Amazonian province of Pastaza (east) and in the coastal Santa Elena (southwest).
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These provinces “are the areas of least influence of narcoterrorist groups,” said Noboa, who took office on November 23.
The prison in El Salvador has capacity for 40,000 prisoners.
One of the most violent prisons in Ecuador is installed in Guayaquil (southwest), a strategic port hit by the presence of criminal gangs that dispute drug trafficking routes. “The worst place to put a prison is next to where criminals live,” Noboa said.
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The president has warned that his plan is to separate the most dangerous inmates and thereby stop the prison massacres that have left 460 prisoners dead since February 2021.
In El Salvador, In February 2023, a megaprison built in the city of Tecoluca with a capacity for 40,000 people began to receive inmates, mainly members of the violent Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs.
The Bukele government usually shares images of inmates crowded together and under strong controls, in the face of criticism of alleged violations of Human Rights by NGOs.. There are 31,321 inmates in Ecuador's penitentiary centers, according to the 2022 prison census.
In order to reduce the prison population, Noboa has said he plans to expel about 1,500 foreign inmates, mostly from Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.
AFP
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