Prison crisis in Ecuador: the heads of the armies and prisons resign

The heads of Ecuador's armed forces and prisons have resigned, the government said on Monday (November 15th), after another bloodbath in a penitentiary and as the country faces a surge in drug trafficking-related crime.

Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso

of the head of the joint command, Vice-Admiral Jorge Cabrera, and the director of the prison agency (SNAI), Bolivar Garzon, the presidency said in a statement.

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New appointments were announced in the wake and Guillermo Lasso convened on Monday a crisis cabinet in Guayaquil (southwest), the country's second city.

The vast prison complex of Guayaquil was the scene on Friday and Saturday of new clashes between rival gangs of inmates which left 68 dead and 25 injured.

With bladed weapons, firearms and explosives, prisoners attacked, after having sabotaged the electricity, the occupants of another unit of the prison, which houses 8,500 inmates with an overcrowding of 60% .

The authorities denounced the

and

of the assailants, which videos posted on social networks showed relentlessly, with knives and sticks, on bodies piled up and charred in a courtyard. A

, after the release of prison last week of a gang leader, would be at the origin of this new violence, according to the police.

Ecuador

, declared President Lasso in the evening.

Promising

of the state, the president judged that the country was facing

.

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Divided into twelve districts, where members of at least seven criminal organizations, often rivals, having links in particular with the Mexican cartels of Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generacion, are held separately, the prison complex of Guayaquil had already been the scene at the end of September of the largest massacre in Ecuador's prison history and one of the worst in Latin America.

During brawls between rival gangs, 119 people were killed there, some detainees having been dismembered, beheaded, or burned.

Since the beginning of the year 320 detainees have died in various episodes of violence.

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The president had decreed on October 18 a

throughout the country to fight against this crime which has claimed the lives of nearly 1,900 people since January.

Another

was declared in the prisons, with military reinforcements.

The Constitutional Court, however, limited its duration and prohibited military personnel from entering prisons.