The authorities reiterated that a clash between gangs was behind the violence in Bellavista.
“This is an unfortunate result of gang violence,” President Guillermo Lasso, on tour in Israel, said on Twitter. The president sent his “heartfelt condolences to the families” of the deceased.
Brutality in the prisons of Ecuador
In Ecuadorian prisons, 350 inmates have been brutally killed since February 2021 in the midst of violence that the government attributes to the confrontation of criminal groups linked to drug trafficking.
Despite multiple measures —including the allocation of a budget, the transfer of the most dangerous inmates to a single center and the creation of a pacification commission— the Lasso government has not been able to stop the prison massacres, one of the worst in Latin America.
The minister considered that the leaders of the gangs should be subjected to more demanding disciplinary regimes.
According to the official, after the incidents, searches were carried out and they found “firearms encaletadas (hidden).”
Recently, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issued a report on the prison crisis in Ecuador in which it urged the Government to regain internal control of the prisons, provide decent conditions for prisoners and develop crime prevention policies where do not prioritize incarceration.
Until the end of 2021 there were more than 36,000 inmates in 36 centers, between prisons and social rehabilitation centers, whose capacity is 30,000, although overcrowding reached 62% in prisons such as Guayaquil, the most populous in the country with 7,231 inmates and scene of the bloodiest episodes experienced last year.
To solve the prison crisis, the government of President Guillermo Lasso is in the process of hiring 1,400 new prison officers, granting around 5,000 pardons to prisoners convicted of minor crimes and developing the country’s first human rights policy towards the prison population. .
With information from AFP and EFE