Clashes between rival drug gangs claimed a minimum of 10 lives within the second lethal riot in an Ecuadoran jail in days, police within the violence-wracked nation mentioned Thursday.
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 useless 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 useless males sprawled on the bottom with naked, blood-stained torsos, a minimum of two of them decapitated.
Apprehensive relations gathered exterior the jail for information of their family members.
ANTONY QUINTERO/AFP through Getty Photos
On Monday, 13 prisoners and a guard had been reported killed in southwest Ecuador, whose overcrowded and violent prisons have change into operational facilities for organized crime teams. Officers mentioned the useless 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 international terrorist organizations.
Nestled between the globe’s high two cocaine exporters — Colombia and Peru — the nation of some 17 million individuals 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 the planet now passes by means of 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 style — their our bodies dismembered and burnt.
Jail events, stay broadcasts
Ecuador’s prisons are among the many most harmful on the planet. The penitentiaries have been underneath army 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 pinnacle of a unique 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 had 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, displaying off the decapitated and charred our bodies of their enemies.
Final yr, gang members took scores of jail guards hostage after the jailbreak of narco boss Jose Adolfo Macias, aka “Fito,” whereas allies on the surface 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 yr, greater than a yr 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 prison 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.
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