It is a new tragedy which strikes the Ecuadorian prison of Guayaquil. A riot between inmates, which began Friday, November 12, left 58 people dead, the police commander said on Saturday. General Tannya Varela also announced at a press conference that the clashes between prisoners left 12 people injured.
The intervention of the police to try to restore order in the prison has ” save lives “, said Pablo Arosemena, governor of the province of Guayas (whose capital is Guayaquil).
This same prison had been the scene, at the end of September, of one of the worst massacres of prisoners in Latin America: 119 prisoners had been killed. Some of them had been dismembered or burned in these violent clashes between gangs linked to drug trafficking and Mexican cartels.
Overcrowding
In this prison, which houses 8,500 prisoners and whose overcrowding reaches 60% according to official figures, the violence has not stopped since.
After the September incidents, 15 other detainees were killed. In February, 79 inmates had died in simultaneous riots in several prisons. Riots in Ecuadorian prisons have killed more than 250 people since the start of the year.
The September massacre prompted the Ecuadorian government to declare a state of emergency for the prison system for sixty days, with the army supporting the police in an attempt to bring order to the country’s sixty-five prisons. They can accommodate 30,000 people but are occupied by 39,000 prisoners, an overcrowding of 30%.