New massacre reflects the spiral of violence and crisis in Ecuador’s prisons

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A new massacre was recorded this Monday at Prison Number 1 in the tropical city of Santo Domingo de los Colorados, in north-central Ecuador, with 13 inmates killed and two injured, bringing the death toll to more than 400 since 2020 in the country’s prison system.

If in 2020 there were 46 prisoners killed in bloody clashes between rival gangs that dispute internal control of the prisons, the figure skyrocketed in 2021 to reach 316, while in this 2022 they already add up to about 80.

Read also: Check out our coverage on Ecuador

Marked overcrowding and the ease for criminal gangs to hide weapons in prisons have placed the prison system as one of the critical focuses of a spiral of violence that has even gone beyond the prison perimeters.

The massacre, like others already registered in the country, has been full of cruelty, with inmates decapitated or mutilated in macabre images that have circulated on social networks.

Interior Minister Patricio Carrillo, in evaluating the new massacre, lamented the “psychological profile” of the murderers and attributed the massacre to one of the gangs seeking to control the prison.

44 DEAD IN MAY

In that same prison, last May, a similar event left 44 people dead and ten injured.

Carrillo accepted that the situation in the prisons does not present the guarantees required to ensure control of the prisons and said he trusts that the estimated plans and budgets (US$200 million) to undertake improvements in the prison system will allow the planned objectives to be achieved soon.

The inclusion of 1,400 new prison guards, with more specialized academic profiles in criminology or psychology, could allow the fulfillment of the task of pacification in prisons, as the Government foresees, although the psychological profile of those who perpetrate these types of crime cannot be understood, the minister insisted.

Likewise, he said that among the actions to mitigate the situation in the Santo Domingo prison, a policy of transferring inmates considered dangerous to “La Roca”, a maximum security prison in the port city of Guayaquil, will continue.

Carrillo added that the investigations will continue to determine the reasons for the massacre and did not consider that the prison authorities should be blamed for the situation, although he did not rule out that there may be actions in this area to try to improve guarantees.

“SELF-REGULATED” PRISONS

However, for specialists in security issues such as Carolina Andrade, the problem is that a “self-regulation policy” has been established in prisons.

“We cannot normalize the violence that we experience in Ecuador” or “normalize the inability to make decisions,” Andrade told Efe, after assuring that what happened in the Santo Domingo prison “demonstrates that nothing has changed since the last prison massacre.”

She criticized the fact that the Government has also failed to apply some recommendations presented last March by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) such as having a suitable budget, the formulation of a social rehabilitation policy, the development of a prison census, the orderly execution of pardons and proper recategorization of prisoners.

“Time passes and it is confirmed that the policy of the Guillemo Lasso government is to do nothing. It is the policy of self-regulation within prisons,” the expert insisted.

She even took the words of the priest and psychologist Luis Barrios, who acts as an advisor to the Prison Pacification Commission organized by the Government, who warned about the absence of the State in the prisons.

“It is the criminal organizations that control the prisons,” Andrade agreed, lamenting that “only patchy responses have been given, unsustainable over time,” while “they continue to kill, extort, kidnap, assault and violate the lives of Ecuadorians.”