Twenty-four detainees were killed and around 40 injured in gunfire clashes between prisoners in a prison in southwest Ecuador, local authorities said.
The violence left
"24 dead and 42 injured,"
the governor of the coastal province of Guayas (whose capital is Guayaquil) said on Twitter, citing a local police official, Commander Fausto Buenano.
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Ecuadorian prisons have for months been the scene of recurrent violence between rival gangs for the control of drug trafficking, according to the authorities. In February, simultaneous riots in four major prisons across the country left 79 people dead, some of whom were beheaded. According to the Ecuadorian ombudsman, 103 murders were committed in the country's prisons in 2020. Between January and August 2021, this violence in the country's prisons has already killed 121 people, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. man (CIDH).
In mid-September, a penitentiary in the same province of Guayas was attacked by drones from outside the establishment.
The incident had not made a victim, but the roof of the prison had been damaged, and the authorities had denounced a
"serious"
attack
, another episode of a
"war between international cartels"
.
Ecuadorian prisons are overcrowded and house 39,000 inmates for 30,000 places.
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After another riot in July that left 27 prisoners dead, the government replaced the authorities in charge of the country's 65 prisons and declared an emergency in the prison system.
He also announced an increase in the number of places in prisons, as part of a plan to restructure the
"precarious"
and
"chaotic"
prison system
.
