Clashes between drug gangs on Thursday claimed at the least 17 lives within the second lethal riot in an Ecuadoran jail in days, with rampaging inmates beheading and maiming rivals, officers within the violence-wracked nation mentioned.
Bloody preventing broke out in a jail within the troubled coastal metropolis of Esmeraldas, close to the Colombian border, the place police mentioned they discovered 10 lifeless prisoners in two cell blocks — including to about 500 inmates massacred within the nation since 2021.
Photos shared on social media and verified by Agence France-Presse confirmed lifeless males sprawled on the bottom with naked, blood-stained torsos, at the least two of them decapitated.
Dozens of frightened members of the family gathered exterior the jail for information of their family members Thursday because the SNAI jail authority raised the official toll from 10 within the morning to 17 by lunchtime.
“There are girls right here who’ve been asking after their kin since 5:30am,” an anguished girl, who requested to not be named, advised AFP.
She herself rushed to the jail after receiving a name from individuals who stay close by and advised her “they heard the taking pictures, they heard the screams.”
When she arrived, she mentioned, troopers advised her to go to the morgue to test if her beloved one was lifeless or alive.
ANTONY QUINTERO/AFP through Getty Photos
On Monday, 13 prisoners and a guard have been reported killed in southwest Ecuador, whose overcrowded and violent prisons have grow to be operational facilities for organized crime teams. Officers mentioned the lifeless inmates belonged to the rival Los Choneros and Los Lobos gangs, two of the most important drug trafficking teams in Ecuador. Earlier this month, the U.S. designated each gangs as overseas terrorist organizations.
Nestled between the globe’s prime two cocaine exporters — Colombia and Peru — the nation of some 17 million folks has seen violence spiral lately as rival gangs with ties to Mexican and Colombian cartels vie for management.
Greater than 70% of all cocaine produced on this planet now passes by Ecuador’s ports, based on authorities information.
Since February 2021, gang wars have largely performed out contained in the nation’s prisons, the place inmates have usually been killed in grotesque vogue — their our bodies dismembered and burnt.
Jail events, stay broadcasts
Ecuador’s prisons are among the many most harmful on this planet. The penitentiaries have been beneath navy management since January 2024, when President Daniel Noboa declared a state of “inside armed battle” after a brutal wave of gang violence.
Jail officers have additionally been focused. Final September, the director of Ecuador’s greatest jail, Maria Daniela Icaza, was killed in an armed assault whereas driving. Her dying got here simply days after the top of a special jail, Alex Guevara, was killed, additionally in an assault whereas touring by automobile.
Ecuador’s greatest jail bloodbath occurred in 2021, when greater than 100 inmates have been killed within the port metropolis of Guayaquil within the southwest.
Inmates have on a couple of event gone stay on social media to broadcast their violent campaigns, exhibiting off the decapitated and charred our bodies of their enemies.
Final 12 months, gang members took scores of jail guards hostage after the jailbreak of narco boss Jose Adolfo Macias, aka “Fito,” whereas allies on the skin detonated bombs and held a tv presenter at gunpoint stay on air.
Fito, the boss of the Los Choneros gang, was recaptured in June this 12 months, greater than a 12 months after his escape.
He had been serving a 34-year sentence since 2011 for involvement in organized crime, drug trafficking and homicide, however continued pulling the strings of the felony underworld from behind bars.
Movies emerged of Fito holding wild events earlier than he escaped from jail, some with fireworks, illustrating the lawlessness of such amenities.
In July, the Ecuadoran authorities extradited Fito to the U.S., the place he pleaded not responsible to fees, together with worldwide cocaine distribution and smuggling firearms.
