Ecuador: What explains the bloody prison riot and how can the war between drug traffickers affect the region?

Bodies shot and with traces of grenade impact in the Litoral Penitentiary, one of the largest prisons in Guayaquil and the country, account for what is already considered the worst prison massacre in Ecuador.

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“This is indeed a war. It is not an extraordinary phenomenon, but a systematic one, in which gangs clash in spaces where the State does not have enough control”.

The words are from Ecuadorian researcher and political analyst Julio Echeverría, who is encouraged to outline some reasons that would explain the prison mess in his country.

Because this situation has not only occurred in Guayaquil, but also in prisons such as that of Latacunga, in the Ecuadorian highlands. “The gangs are distributed in all the prisons of the country”, Says the specialist.

“The declaration of emergency given by President Guillermo Lasso is just a step to try to bring order”.

Now are the Choneros and the Lobos, local criminal groups that work as affiliates of organizations dedicated to drug trafficking (“armed arms of the Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación cartels”), But there are others.

“Ecuador has been taken over by these organizations that understand the country as a territory that guarantees the exit of cocaine production from Colombia and Peru, through the ports of the Pacific coast.”.

The figures are overwhelming: in the 2020, the fights for control between Choneros and Lizards they left 51 crimes in jails. A year earlier, according to National Service of Attention to Persons Deprived of Liberty, 32 people were killed.

Cuttings with machetes, deaths from beatings, suicides: this is the panorama that exists inside Ecuadorian prisons.

And it is not the first time that prisoners have rioted.

On February 23, 2021, “at least 62 people were killed in the riots registered in the prisons of Guayaquil, Truzi (Azuay) and Cotopaxi”.

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Photograph provided by the Government of Guayas that shows a group of officers of the Armed Forces during an operation at dawn on Thursday 30, in the Litoral Penitentiary, in Guayaquil (Ecuador). EFE (Government of Guayas /)

BETWEEN PASSIVITY AND FORGETTING

What is happening now in Guayaquil does not surprise Echeverría: if what these organizations seek is to guarantee the exit of cocaine to USA and Europe, nothing will stop them.

“It should not be forgotten that, in the past regime, surveillance and control systems were dismantled, especially when the United States was expelled from the Manta base, where control was exercised over the entire Pacific coast of central and southern Ecuador.”.

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This entire area, Echeverría says, was left virtually unprotected, becoming a point of departure for drugs to international markets.

“Let us not forget that one of the objectives of these groups is to control the ports, in particular that of Guayaquil. There, they share the capacity to contaminate the containers “.

When they do not agree, there are problems, and that is when all the systemic apparatus that explains the very violent riot in the Guayaquil jail is revealed.

“The State has been permissive with regard to the control of prisons, so the penitentiary system is in the hands of these gangs”.

And if it is the phenomenon in question that has become more acute – since before 2010, says Echeverría – it is because, in some way, a kind of coexistence of the State with these organizations was allowed.

The fact is that, at present, “prisons have become nuclei, almost barracks where gangs find protection and from where they direct their operations”.

THE DANGER OF THE CONTAGIOUS EFFECT

It is not only drug trafficking at the domestic or export level, this chaos has also encouraged the increase of the hitmen.

By August of this year, “El Comercio” of Ecuador said that 38 shootings had been registered in the country, and that, in the first semester, 1,025 crimes were added.

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“That number is close to the total number of murders perpetrated in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. During that year 1,372 crimes were reported and the homicide rate in Ecuador was at its highest point since 2015″, Write the medium.

Echeverría notes:

“The hit men are at the service of gangs dedicated to drug trafficking. We are facing a diversification and specialization in the various lines that feed this illegal business”.

The crisis generated by coronavirus pandemic left a large part of the population in conditions of “informality and precariousness“, Which according to the specialist, becomes”the breeding ground“So that this situation gets out of control.

“And this is a phenomenon that must be seen regionally. The solutions have to be thought of that way because this situation can be replicated in neighboring countries and in other latitudes.”.

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