Seven prisoners were found dead in a prison in southwest Ecuador, where Latin America's worst prisoner massacre took place in late September with 119 inmates killed in gang clashes, services said on Saturday. penitentiaries.
Read also Ecuador: 116 detainees killed in violence in a prison
"The lifeless bodies of seven prisoners"
were found, indicated on its Twitter account the National Service of integral attention to adults deprived of liberty (SNAI), body responsible for the administration of prisons.
This discovery took place in the
"zone of visits of pavilion 10"
of the detention center of Guayas, in Guayaquil (southwest), adds the SNAI.
This vast prison complex was the scene at the end of September of the massacre of 119 prisoners, some of whom had been dismembered or burned, in violent clashes between gangs linked to drug trafficking and Mexican cartels.
The SNAI had already reported on October 14 the discovery of the bodies of four detainees in the same detention center and mentioned a suicide.
According to official figures, at least 240 prisoners have been killed since early 2021 in Ecuadorian prisons, overcrowded and the scene of recurrent violence for years.
In February, simultaneous unrest in four prisons left 79 prisoners dead.
After the September massacre, Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso declared
a 60-day
“state of emergency”
in the country's 65 prisons, including the deployment of significant military reinforcements.
Ecuador faces a rise in drug-related crime, with nearly 1,900 violent deaths since the start of the year, particularly in Guayaquil, a port city and economic center of the country.
Faced with this situation, the conservative president, elected in May, declared on Monday a state of emergency throughout the country to fight against insecurity and drug trafficking, with the deployment of soldiers there too.
