Yet another prison massacre rocked the Penitenciaría del Litoral, the main prison in Guayaquil (Guayas province) on 12 November, leaving 68 inmates dead and triggering a public spat between President Guillermo Lasso and the constitutional court (CC). The violence was the latest in a string of massacres in Ecuador’s penal system, of which the Guayaquil prison has borne the brunt. Lasso accused the CC of watering down a state of exception that he had declared on 18 October in response to mounting violence; the CC retorted that Ecuador’s prison crisis requires structural reform rather than repeated states of exception.
According to Guayas governor Pablo Arosemena, the latest massacre was triggered by the release of an imprisoned gang leader, leaving a power vacuum inside the prison that a rival gang attempted to exploit via a “total massacre” of its rivals. Whilst the authorities have not named the gangs involved, previous massacres at the prison have been the result of tensions between Los Lobos and Los Choneros – Ecuador’s two most powerful criminal organisations, which act as subcontractors for rival Mexican drug trafficking organisations and battle for control of Guayaquil’s port.
The killings add to the grim toll in a year of record violence in Ecuador’s prison system. According to the local media, over 300 prisoners have been murdered this year, compared to 51 violent deaths in 2020. The Penitenciaría del Litoral has seen the worst of this upswing, being the site of the country’s worst ever prison massacre on 28 September, which left 116 inmates dead, and one of the four sites that suffered the coordinated 23 February massacres, which killed 79.
With Lasso having made prison security a key theme of his security agenda on the campaign trail, he is under pressure to restore order to Ecuador’s penitentiaries. Following the September massacre, he decreed a state of exception that saw the police deployed to assist in prison management and the military mobilised to secure prison perimeters. Lasso declared a further state of exception on 18 October, mobilising the armed forces to participate in domestic policing operations for a period of 60 days in response to a broader rise in criminal activity.
However, on 4 November the CC reduced the length of this state of exception to 30 days, limited troop deployments to nine provinces instead of the whole country, and restricted military operations to those that “complement” the work done by the national police. Feeling the heat over the latest eruption of prison violence, Lasso turned on the CC the day after the massacre, demanding “better constitutional tools to protect the population [and] restore order in prisons” and warning that “the security forces are unable to act”. The CC issued a frosty response, accusing Lasso of “seeking to evade his own responsibilities” and insisting that prison violence “requires concrete and structural actions, different to those adopted under a state of exception”.
Following a meeting on 15 November with the heads of Ecuador’s high courts, attorney general’s office, police, military, and the national assembly, Lasso announced a ‘national agreement on the prison crisis’. This will see the indefinite deployment of the police and military to Ecuador’s prisons; the promotion of dialogue between rival gangs; a new ‘citizens defence bill’ that aims to make gang leaders responsible for crimes committed by their subordinates; early release from prison for well behaved inmates; and measures to reduce pre-trial detention, among other things.
Resignations
The head of the Ecuadorean military’s joint command, Jorge Cabrera, and the director of Ecuador’s prisons authority (SNAI), Bolívar Fernando Garzón, both resigned the day after the massacre. Cabrera was replaced by General Orlando Fabián Fuel Revelo, and Garzón temporarily replaced by Fausto Cobo, who headed the SNAI until September before becoming director of Ecuador’s national intelligence agency (CIES). Cobo will maintain his current position at CIES whilst also overseeing the SNAI.