The massacre of 79 prisoners in Ecuador reveals the failure …

Tuesday’s bloody riots in four prisons in Ecuador So far, they have left a balance of 79 dead prisoners and rarely seen horror scenes. Too they revealed President Lenin Moreno’s erratic management of security matters. Although authorities were quick to say that the massacre was due to a fierce showdown between gangs vying for control of the lodges, the alleged triggering event (the murder of an ex-convict) took place last December. Was it a foretold tragedy?

“In 2019, Ecuador has already suffered from a situation similar to the current one, I mean the taking of justice with their own hands by people deprived of their liberty. Lenin Moreno’s only response was militarization and policing in prisons. It certainly did not work because the same disasters repeated themselves in 2020 and 2021, ”said Jorge Vicente Paladines, professor at the Central University of Ecuador, in dialogue with Page 12.

Of the total death toll, 31 were recorded in Guayas Prison No. 4 and 6 in Prison No. 1, both located in Guayaquil. Meanwhile, 34 people died in Azuay prison in Cuenca and the other 8 in Cotopaxi in the town of Latacunga. These enclosures concentrate 70 percent of the intramural population. The country is facing an unprecedented prison crisis. Several policies developed during the government of Rafael Correa were dismantled by Moreno as part of his “austerity plan” to make do with the IMF.

The largest massacre in the country’s history came in the midst of a frantic race for the second presidential round. While Lenin Moreno suggested that Correísmo could be at the origin of the excesses, the UNES candidate, Andrés Arauz, toppled the president, assuring that the country “can no longer bear the absence of leadership and leadership. Lastly, banker Guillermo Lasso expressed his “full support” for the police.

Disassembled system

Dozens of relatives of the 79 dead have gathered since Wednesday morning in front of Prison No.4 and the Guayaquil morgue to ask for the remains of inmates who died in the clashes. As in the Ecuadorian capital, the army and police were still stationed in the rest of the prisons to prevent further riots.

The candidate with the most votes in the first presidential round, Andrés Arauz, accused Lenin Moreno of “unfortunate episodes of riots, violence and death” and I remembered that During Rafael Correa’s government, there was a committee that met every week to analyze the prison situation. “There the police, ministries, army and other security forces of Ecuador intervened and everyone found out what was going on,” said the young economist.

“Moreno’s government is neoliberal and has acted accordingly. The dismantling of the State has been very strong in the specific field of security, so the problem goes beyond the disappearance of the citizen security committees, ”he warned this newspaper. Mario ramos, director of the Andean Center for Strategic Studies. Ramos enumerated the disappearance of the Ministry of Justice or the Ministry of the Interior, so that in short “All the institutions created to strengthen the corps of prison guides have been dismantled.”

The official version

At a Quito press conference, Prison director Edmundo Moncayo attributed the riots to fighting between at least two criminal gangs vying for power. The situation is said to be due to the vacuum created after the murder last December of a detainee who had been released, José Luis Zambrano, alias “Rasquiña” and alleged leader of an organization known as “Los Choneros”.

“The government version is a smokescreen. It cannot be denied that there is fighting between gangs in prisons around the world, but it does not necessarily lead to barbarism of this magnitude.”, Ramos expressed, expert in security matters. In the same line, Alliance for Human Rights I consider that “Attributing violence exclusively to gang conflicts makes other causes invisible”, among which stand out “the punitiveness of the State and the criminalization of impoverishment”.

With chainsaws and other tools, inmates at Turi Rehabilitation Center in Cuenca opened the doors of the special maximum security section on Tuesday. and massacred over 30 detainees. The same scenes were seen in three other penalties. Official news took a while to arrive and produced disparate numbers, but it leaked through videos and images that quickly went viral.

The recording of these cell phone images was worthy of the best horror films: you could see the corpses of inmates and even dismembered bodies. “How can a chainsaw get into a prison? It talks about the breakdown and failure of the prison system”, Held Paladins about.

The story repeats itself

Riots in Ecuadorian prisons are not a new phenomenon. Last August, President Lenin Moreno declared a state of emergency in the country’s prison system in the face of what he called “chaos” generated by the “mafias” inside prisons.

On August 3, nine deaths were reported, including two cremated, six police officers injured and 20 other prisoners injured due to a gang-gang settling of scores in Guayaquil prison. In December, several riots in Ecuadorian prisons attributed to power struggles between criminal organizations and drug trafficking left 11 dead and seven others injured.

“For a change, as has been the speech of these four years, Moreno blames Correa and Correísmo for these events. It’s incredible. We are faced with a case of immeasurable pathological cynicism “Explain Ramos.

Think about future solutions, Paladins He believes that it is not so true that in Ecuador, the prison authority must be recovered, “because the police already administer the prisons”. For the Ecuadorian lawyer, what really exists is a structural failure of the system: “We must undertake a judicious reform. The Ecuadorian police force exceeds its powers”.