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Guayaquil (Ecuador) (AFP) – A confrontation between inmates that took place on Tuesday in a maximum security prison in Ecuador left three inmates dead and another wounded, reported the agency in charge of prisons (SNAI).
“As part of the incidents that occurred, an injured PPL (person deprived of liberty) was transferred to a health home. Likewise, three deceased inmates were registered,” the agency reported in a statement.
The penitentiary, called La Roca and located in the port of Guayaquil (southwest), has a capacity for about 150 inmates and housed 23 prisoners, most of them drug gang leaders who violently dispute power inside prisons and on the streets. .
The SNAI indicated that after the incidents, prison officers, police and military activated security protocols with which “control was retaken.”
He specified that in the Guayas 3 (La Roca) prison there were clashes between members of the “organized crime groups” called R7 and Los Lobos, with links to international cartels such as the Mexican Sinaloa and Nueva Generación.
In that penitentiary, ex-police officer Germán Cáceres, accused of the murder of his wife in September inside a police school in Quito where he worked, is also being held, a case of femicide that sparked social protests.
outrageous fact
Interior Minister Juan Zapata reported that Cáceres, who was arrested in Colombia, is not among the fatalities, according to the Guayaquil newspaper El Universo.
The SNAI, which did not report incidents in other penitentiaries in the country, indicated that it “will maintain permanent coordination with the competent entities to reinforce control inside” the Ecuadorian maximum security prison.
The government of right-wing President Guillermo Lasso, who is waging a war on drugs, reopened Guayas 3, which is part of a large Guayaquil prison complex that has been the scene of several of the massacres in Ecuador, leaving more than 400 inmates deceased since February 2021.
Some of the killings have gone on to rank among the worst in Latin America. In September 2021, clashes between prisoners in the largest prison in Guayaquil left 119 dead.
Several of the clashes have been broadcast live through social networks. Bodies mutilated with machetes and burned are the traces left by drug violence in the nation.
The Prison Observatory, an independent body made up of academics, described what happened at La Roca on Tuesday as “outrageous.”
“How did weapons get in there? Until when will violence be the norm in our system,” the agency questioned on Twitter.
Prisoner “warehouses”
According to the government, the prison massacres are the product of clashes between rival gangs that dispute drug transit routes.
The first prison census carried out last year in Ecuador showed that there are 31,319 prisoners in 36 prisons distributed nationwide.
Ecuador’s prison system has a capacity for 30,000 people.
In 2021, the overcrowding reached 39,000 inmates, but in the midst of the massacres, the Executive granted pardons and benefits to decongest the prisons.
A pacification committee created by President Lasso said in April that Ecuadorian prisons “are considered warehouses for human beings and torture centers.”
Located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s largest cocaine producers, Ecuador has seen violent deaths and drug seizures grow in parallel (more than 400 tons, mainly cocaine, since 2021).
In the country, the homicide rate almost doubled between 2021 and 2022, going from 14 to 25 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to authorities
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