Ecuador prisoners hold 57 guards, police hostage

Inmates at a correction facility in the Ecuadoran city of Cuenca took 50 guards and seven police officers hostage, said Interior Minister Juan Zapata.

"We are concerned about the safety of our officials," he said at a press conference in the capital, Quito. Zapata's comments came in the middle of a day when two car bombs exploded in Quito, allegedly in response to authorities' efforts to clean up the nation's prison system.

"There are violent actions like that of the two cars burned in Quito last night, clearly that's a reaction to an action. The action of imposing order in the prisons, the reaction to intimidate," President Guillermo Lasso said at a housing event in Los Rios province.

Local journalist Christian Sanchez Mendieta reported prisoners had reached the prison roofs on Thursday.

What led to the hostage situation?

Drug trafficking gangs in Ecuador are currently engaged in a war for power, with the prisons as centers of operations.

The three prisons of Latacunga, Cuenca and Azogues are allegedly controlled by the criminal gang Los Lobos. Altercations between Los Lobos and members of other organized crime gangs have killed over 430 inmates in Ecuador prisons since 2021.

Lasso, on July 24, decreed a 60-day state of emergency for the entire penitentiary system, allowing him to deploy the military in prisons for a clean-up spree. 

Hundreds of soldiers and police officers carried out a search operation at the Andean Latacunga prison on Wednesday in an attempt to find and seize weapons, ammunition and explosives.

Authorities confiscated 49 bladed weapons, two bulletproof vests, ammunition, cash, thirteen gallons (49.2 liters) of alcohol, 39 mobile communications devices, five telephone chips and four additional micro SD cards from the Latacunga prison.

The Latacunga raid followed similar raids carried out in previous weeks in the Guayas prison complex, where authorities found rifles, grenades and grenade launchers, among other prohibited items.

The riot in the prison of Cuenca initially began as a protest against this intervention. Later, authorities indicated that the detention was in protest against the transfer of inmates to other prisons.

Appeal from the hostages

A viral video, allegedly recorded inside the Cuenca prison by the detained police and correctional officers, showed them appeal to the government to secure their release.

One of the spokespersons in the video, police lieutenant Alonso Quintana, appealed that the government "not make decisions that violate the human rights of the persons deprived of their freedom."

There are reportedly 400 military and 200 police officers deployed outside the prison, who have been unable to enter the premises since Wednesday.

mk/sms (AFP, EFE)