Six detainees were found hanged on Wednesday in a prison in Guayaquil, a large port city in southwestern Ecuador plagued by violence linked to drug trafficking, we learned from an official source.
“
During a review of the pavilions of the prison of Guayas 1, the guards found six prisoners hanged
”, announced in a press release the national penitentiary service (SNAI).
Recurring massacres
The victims were hung by the neck in their cell, an official from the same service told AFP.
Ecuadorian prisons are the scene of recurrent massacres between prisoners, against a backdrop of rivalry between criminal groups fighting over drug trafficking.
Since February 2021, eight massacres have been recorded in these prisons, with more than 400 prisoners killed, most of them dismembered and burned.
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The country's main port on the Pacific coast, Guayaquil has in recent years become the hub and epicenter of drug trafficking in Ecuador, located between Colombia and Peru - the world's main cocaine producers.
Faced with the wave of violence by criminal groups, President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency on March 3 for 60 days in three provinces, including those of Guayaquil and Esmeraldas (north-west).
On Tuesday, nine people were killed in the latter province, during the attack on a fishing port by around thirty armed individuals who opened fire indiscriminately on the crowd.
This unprecedented attack, described as a massacre by the local press, marks a new escalation in the wave of gang violence that is overwhelming this part of the country.
