Guayaquil, Ecuador.- Six prisoners were found hanged in a prison in Guayaquil, the city hardest hit by prison massacres in Ecuador due to drug-trafficking struggles.
In a short message sent to the press, the body in charge of managing prisons (SNAI) reported on the discovery of the corpses in their cells “during the review of pavilions” in the Guayas prison number 1.
The authorities have not specified if the prisoners had signs of violence, nor if they belonged to criminal gangs.
On the outskirts of the prison, some relatives of inmates approached this morning to ask for information about their relatives. Several ambulances entered the jail.
The deceased were in pavilion 5 of this prison that houses some 6,800 prisoners and is part of a large prison complex.
According to local media, that pavilion is controlled by a gang called Las Águilas that imposes its law and extorts the prisoners.
In Guayaquil (southwest), Ecuador’s main commercial port, most of the more than 400 deaths of prisoners have occurred in the prison massacres registered since February 2021.
The Government of President Guillermo Lasso considers that the massacres are the product of clashes between rival gangs linked to drug trafficking, which are fighting over routes and territory for drug trafficking with blood and fire.
The massacres leave beheaded, charred and dismembered bodies in a country hit by an upsurge in violence and plunged into the worst prison crisis in its history. The most serious was recorded in September 2021, when 119 prisoners were murdered.
