Video capture showing the mutiny of the prisoners in the Guayaquil prison.
A new prison riot left part of the Guayaquil regional prison penitentiary center in flames this Wednesday, in Ecuador. In the images that circulate on social networks and that raised the alert about what was happening inside the center, the prisoners have burned mattresses, brandished sticks and shots were heard. In other videos, the detainees, with their faces covered with their t-shirts, complain to the president, Daniel Noboa, that they are being mistreated by the military.
On this occasion, the mutiny faced by the Ecuadorian Government is not due to a dispute between gangs, but rather due to a protest against the State. The National Service for Persons Deprived of Liberty, SNAI, has reported that “the events are due to an internal revolt by a group of people deprived of liberty,” the document says, without giving details if there are injuries or deaths. According to the agency, “the penitentiary center is 80% controlled.”
Ecuador's prisons have been militarized since January 8, when the Noboa Government faced its first mutiny in seven prisons in the country simultaneously. To control the violence in the penitentiaries and on the streets, the president decreed a state of exception and an internal armed conflict, with which he managed to allow the military to enter the pavilions, carry out operations and have control of the prison. This is something extraordinary, since Ecuadorian regulations prohibit the presence of military personnel in prisons beyond the first security filter. This shock measure has managed to reduce homicides by 50%, which has boosted Noboa's popularity, which exceeds 80%.
The Guayaquil penitentiary complex is made up of four prisons, which together hold around 12,000 prisoners. Among those is La Roca, considered maximum security, where Ricardo Barreiro Abad, son of the vice president, is detained, who by order of a judge was sent to that prison while an alleged crime of offering influence peddling in the vice presidency is being investigated. .
Under the state of emergency, the Armed Forces have carried out more than 200,000 control operations in the country in search of what they call terrorists or, in other words, gang members. The same model that Nayib Bukele applied in El Salvador is being followed to end the gangs. During this extraordinary period, 16,459 people have been arrested, 280 of them for terrorism, according to the military. In the 79 days of exception, the uniformed officers have confiscated weapons, mobile phones, drugs, money and other prohibited objects from the prisons that have been brought in due to the corruption of the institutions in charge of the prisons. The regional prison, where 4,500 people are imprisoned, is led by the Los Choneros criminal gang, one of the most dangerous in the country. Adolfo Macías, alias Fito, the leader of this criminal organization, escaped from this center. The authorities realized his absence when they went in to carry out an operation to control objects in the cells, which were always under the control of the prisoners and not the State.
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