One dead and four injured after prison riot in Ecuador

One dead and four injured have preliminarily left Wednesday night’s riot at the regional prison of the coastal city of Guayaquil, which occurred while Ecuador is under a state of emergency, Deputy Security Minister Lyonel Calderón reported this Thursday. .

Although he asserted that the situation in that penitentiary is under control, the official clarified on the Teleamazonas channel that he still needs to wait “for a complete audit of the entire penitentiary to be completed.”

“At this moment, we cannot say that this is all that happened, what we can say is that the situation is completely under control,” he pointed out.

Obviously The prisoners protested the treatment of the army towards them during the stay of the Armed Forces in the prison.

Early this Thursday, relatives of prisoners stationed outside the prison carrying white balloons demanded information about their relatives and, in protest, threw water on military trucks present in the area.

Calderón pointed out that “the rebellion and its escalation were completely reduced in record time, just over 2 hours” and reminded that the control of the prison is “complex”, which must be carried out in several stages.

He pointed out that they are still conducting investigations to determine those responsible for Wednesday’s riots, without specifying whether the victims were inmates or prison officials.

“Destabilizing actions”

Asked if the riots could be linked to parallel events since Wednesday, such as the burning of three vehicles and a gas station in Guayaquil, among others, Calderón assured that the situation must be seen in context.

“These are attempts to destabilize the rule of law, democracy, because we are on the eve of a public consultation aimed at solving security problems: extradition, increasing penalties for serious crimes,” among others.

He said that amid the internal armed conflict and the “historic fight against the organized crime of narco-terrorism”, the actions carried out “resulted in destabilizing acts”.

“It is no coincidence that today, when some early testimonies in a very important case will be conducted, situations like this are starting to happen. These events are not isolated, we are on the eve of the national consultation (April 21). ), which has as its axis attention to the security problems that the country of Ecuador is going through,” he repeated.

He added that a plan has already been made for his reinforcement in each of the places where riots usually start and “the situation is under control”.

Regional prison

The Guayaquil regional prison was one of the most frequently intervened by the police and armed forces during the state of emergency, with repeated operations to seize weapons and targets prohibited from inmates.

Drug trafficker José Adolfo Macías Villamar (‘Fito’), the leader of the criminal group Los Choneros, who was serving a sentence of 34 years in prison for drug trafficking, illegal association, escaped from this prison from the end of December to the beginning of January of the previous year and murder.

Until the beginning of the state of emergency, Los Choneros, the largest and oldest criminal group in Ecuador, had control over the interior of the prison, where they charged inmates quotas for the type of cell they used, as well as for food. elements of a wide extortion network, according to witnesses.

This prison complex is part of the prison complex of the coastal province of Guayas, whose capital is Guayaquil, where there are five prisons housing about 12,000 inmates.

The regional, officially called Guayas Center for Social Rehabilitation number 4, is the second largest prison in Ecuador with about 4,500 inmates, surpassed only by the neighboring penitentiary Litoral with about 5,500 inmates.