Military cordoned off the Zonal 8 Deprivation of Liberty Center this Tuesday during a riot, in Guayaquil (Ecuador) .Marcos Pin / EFE
The situation in Ecuador's prisons is critical.
It has been for at least two years, but this Tuesday the lack of control and level of internal violence got out of control.
At least 50 prisoners died in a simultaneous triple mutiny registered in three prisons in the country.
President Lenín Moreno assured that behind the confrontations between inmates are "criminal organizations."
The government has sent police reinforcements "to regain control in the prisons of Guayaquil, Cuenca and Latacunga," the president said at noon on Tuesday.
At nine in the morning the first alarms had gone off.
Seven hours later, only the Guayaquil prison, one of the largest, had been pacified.
The Prosecutor's Office confirmed the removal of eight bodies from the Latacunga prison, in the province of Cotopaxi, where the former vice president of Rafael Correa, Jorge Glas, is serving prison for the Odebrecht case.
But it was not confirmed if there were injuries and if there were internal security personnel among the victims.
The Minister of Government, Patricio Carrillo, indicated that among the mutineers in that center there were "high risk" inmates.
The Unified Command Post, made up of police and military, was then summoned to regain control of the prisons.
As a preliminary explanation, the National Service for Comprehensive Attention to Deprived of Liberty, SNAI, which is the governing body of prisons, pointed to an inspection carried out the night before.
“It is worth mentioning that last night a search was carried out in the Guayas Center for the Deprivation of Liberty No. 4 -the one in Guayaquil-, for which it is presumed that these events are a sign of resistance and rejection by the inmates before the control actions ”, he communicated through social networks.
It is not the first time that the authorities have attributed the riots between inmates to the wars of criminal gangs.
In the last two years, the Government decreed two states of exception to regain control within the prisons.
In May 2019, three riots in the span of a month and a half left 10 inmates dead and some very stark images of cremated bodies and a beheaded.
The declaration of emergency was extended 90 days.
Just one year later, in August 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, another outbreak of violence led to a new 90-day state of exception, after a key witness in a hospital corruption case was assassinated in prison.
Then, the director of the penitentiary system recognized that there were recurring problems and, among them, the overcrowding of prisoners in the 53 centers of deprivation of liberty in the country.