Six prisoners of Colombian origin, accused of having allegedly participated in the murder of the presidential candidate of Ecuador, Fernando Villavicencio, were found dead this Friday in the Litoral Penitentiary, the largest prison in the country. The National Service for Comprehensive Care of Persons Deprived of Liberty was the one who confirmed the identity of the bodies after the Prosecutor’s Office and the Police accessed the prison to remove the bodies.
The six men were accused of being the material authors of the murder of Villavicencio, which took place on August 9 of this same year. Along with them, a seventh man participated, who was the hitman who fired shots at the candidate and who died minutes later due to the shots fired by the politician’s security personnel.
The alarm about the murder of the six men was raised by the citizen platform SOS Cárceles Ecuador, which classified the events as “murder” and assured that the inmates “had requested a transfer to a safer prison.” These were deprived of liberty in pavilion 7 of the Litoral Penitentiary, the largest center in the Guayaquil prison complex, which has a dozen pavilions controlled by different criminal gangs. In total there are about 5,700 people detained. The platform also highlighted that “the murdered inmates do not show signs of torture or wounds resulting from combat.” The events occur a few days after the United States offered up to five million dollars as a reward to those who provided information about the intellectual author who ordered the murder of the candidate.
The murder of Villavicencio raised the wave of violence attributed to organized crime, which has caused Ecuador to be one of the most violent countries in the world, with a rate of 25.32 intentional homicides in 2022, the highest since records have been kept. .
The most violent
In the Litoral Penitentiary, where some 12,300 people are imprisoned between the five prisons, the most numerous massacres have occurred. Since 2020, more than 400 prisoners have been killed, mainly due to clashes between rival criminal gangs.
The president of Ecuador, Guillermo Laso, has reported through social networks that he will return from the United States – he was on a personal trip when the news broke – and will convene a security cabinet. «Neither complicity nor cover-up. “Here the truth will be known,” he declared to put an end to the suspicions generated when the inmates died in state custody.
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