(Guayaquil) Ecuador is “seriously threatened” by the narcotrafficking mafias who want “to take control of all the prisons in the country,” President Guillermo Lasso said on Monday, announcing that a “massive operation” by the police and army was underway in Guayaquil prison.
Ecuador “is seriously threatened from the outside by the narcotrafficking mafias, these same mafias who claim to take control of all the country’s prisons and impose insecurity in the streets”, declared President Lasso in the evening.
Promising “joint actions” by the state to put an end to the repeated massacres between detainees, he judged that the country was facing “one of the greatest crises of recent decades”.
The head of state announced in the wake that the “national police and the armed forces had entered the penitentiary of Guayaquil, in a massive operation, taking control of the installations for an indefinite period”.
Soldiers armed with rifles entered the perimeter of Guayas 1 prison, which includes several security rings, during the day, AFP journalists noted. But they had not yet entered in the evening in the pavilions where the prisoners reside, according to a military source.
These 1000 police and soldiers entered Guayas 1 “to deploy operational actions to control access and the external and internal perimeter”, according to the authorities.
“Shock the nation”
The operation took place “in compliance with all security parameters and in strict compliance with the legal provisions in force,” assured President Lasso.
The vast prison complex of Guayaquil was the scene on Friday and Saturday of new clashes between rival gangs of inmates which left 68 dead and 25 injured.
With bladed weapons, firearms and explosives, prisoners attacked, after having sabotaged the electricity, the occupants of another unit of the prison, which houses 8,500 inmates with an overcrowding of 60% .
The authorities denounced the “savagery” and “barbarism” of the attackers, which videos posted on social networks showed bitterly, with knives and sticks, on bodies piled up and charred in a courtyard.
A “struggle for leadership”, after the release of prison last week of a gang leader, would be at the origin of this new violence, according to the police.
On Monday morning, President Lasso “accepted the resignation” of the head of the joint command, Vice-Admiral Jorge Cabrera, and the director of the prison agency (SNAI), Bolivar Garzon.
New appointments were announced in the wake and Mr. Lasso assembled on Monday a crisis cabinet on site in Guayaquil (southwest), the second city and largest port in the country.
In the afternoon, the spokesperson for the presidency, Carlos Jijon implied the existence of a political plot to destabilize the government of the conservative president implicated in the Pandora Papers for alleged offense of tax evasion. .
“The real objective (of the massacre) was to commit an act of terrorism which would shock the nation”, assured Mr. Jijon, estimating that it was not only “a clash between bands of prisoners or gangs” but “a extremely serious situation which has political ramifications ”.
Divided into twelve districts, where members of at least seven criminal organizations, often rivals, having links in particular with the Mexican cartels of Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generacion, are held separately, the prison complex of Guayaquil had already been the scene at the end of September of the largest massacre in Ecuador’s prison history and one of the worst in Latin America.
During brawls between rival gangs, 119 people had been killed there, some detainees had been dismembered, beheaded, or burned. Since the beginning of the year 320 prisoners have died in various episodes of violence in the country’s prisons.
The 65 Ecuadorian prisons suffer from 30% overcrowding. Weapons of all kinds, drugs and cell phones circulate there in large numbers.
Located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s main producers of cocaine, and used as a transit zone for shipping to the United States and Europe, Ecuador faces a rise in drug trafficking-related crime .
The president had decreed on October 18 a “state of emergency” throughout the country to fight against this crime which has claimed the lives of nearly 1900 people since January.
Another “state of emergency” was declared in the prisons, with military reinforcements. However, the Constitutional Court partially limited its duration and prohibited military personnel from entering prisons.