President declares prison emergency after 116 killed in riot
ECUADOR’S PRESIDENT has declared a state of emergency in the prison system, following a battle among gang members in a coastal lockup that killed at least 116 people and injured 80, in what authorities say was the worst prison bloodbath ever in the country.
Officials said at least five of the dead were found to have been beheaded.
President Guillermo Lasso decreed a state of emergency on Wednesday, which will give the government powers that include deploying police and soldiers inside prisons. The order came a day after bloodshed at the Litoral Penitentiary in Guayaquil that officials blamed on gangs linked to international drug cartels fighting for control of the facility.
Lasso, visibly moved by the carnage, said at a news conference that what had happened in the prison was “bad and sad”. He also said he could not guarantee that authorities had regained control of the lock-up.
“It is regrettable that the prisons are being turned into territories for power disputes by criminal gangs,” he said, adding that he would act with “absolute firmness” to regain control of the Litoral prison and prevent the violence from spreading to other penitentiaries.
Images circulating on social media showed dozens of bodies in the prison’s Pavilions 9 and 10 and scenes that looked like battlefields. The fighting was with firearms, knives and bombs, officials said. Earlier, regional police commander Fausto Buenaño had said that bodies were being found in the prison’s pipelines.
Outside the prison morgue, the relatives of inmates wept, with some describing to reporters the cruelty with which their loved ones were decapitated and dismembered.
“In the history of the country, there has not been an incident similar or close to this one,” said Ledy Zúñiga, the former president of Ecuador’s National Rehabilitation Council.
DEADLY RIOTS LAST FEBRUARY
Zúñiga, who was also the country’s minister of justice in 2016, said she regretted that steps had not been taken to prevent another massacre, following deadly prison riots last February.
Earlier, officials said the violence erupted from a dispute between the ‘Los Lobos’ and ‘Los Choneros’ prison gangs.
Col Mario Pazmiño, the former director of Ecuador’s military intelligence, said the bloody fighting shows that “transnational organised crime has permeated the structure” of Ecuador’s prisons, adding that Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels operate through local gangs.
“They want to sow fear,” he told The Associated Press on Wednesday, urging the government to temporarily cede control of the prisons to the national police. “The more radical and violent the way they murder,” the more they achieve their goal of control, he added.
Luis Hernández, an analyst on political and military affairs who was a general in Ecuador’s army, said imprisoned gang members extend their control from prisons to the streets, managing debts, deliveries and other aspects of the illegal drug trade.
Ecuador is a key transit point for drugtrafficking organisations because of its good road infrastructure, three international maritime ports, and two international airports, Hernández said.