By EFE
16 Oct 2024, 2:54 PM EDT
The National Service for Comprehensive Attention to Persons Deprived of Liberty (SNAI), the penitentiary unit of Ecuador, reported on the discovery of two bodies in the Litoral Penitentiarythe largest and most populated prison in the country, located in the city of Guayaquil.
The bodies of the two inmates were transferred to the Forensic Medicine Department to undergo forensic investigation procedures to determine the causes of death, the SNAI said in a statement.
The discovery was made during security checks at the Penitentiaryofficially called Guayas Deprivation of Liberty Center Number 1, by SNAI personnel in coordination with the Police, the ECU-911 Integrated Security Service and the Prosecutor’s Office of the province of Guayas, the source added.
The SNAI also indicated that it will file a complaint with the jurisdiction’s Prosecutor’s Office “to determine the causes and responsibilities” of this case.
Between 2021 and 2023, more than 500 prisoners were murdered in Ecuadorian prisonsmany of them in a series of massacres between gangs that sought to displace their rivals to consolidate internal control of the prisons.
Some of these massacres occurred in the Litoral Penitentiary, which houses approximately half of the approximately 12,000 prisoners held in the Guayaquil penitentiary complex, a group of five prisons located in this city.
Earlier this year, the president of Ecuador, the businessman Daniel Noboadecreed a state of exception that allowed the military and police to intervene in the prisons to take control and put an end to the violence in the prisons that had also taken to the streets.
The most conflictive prisons were militarized at the same time that the Government also declared a situation of “internal armed conflict” in the country so that the security forces could initiate actions against organized crime gangs that became classified as terrorist groups.
The military and police continue with the mission of controlling prisons, despite the fact that several periods of state of emergency have ended, a mechanism used by the Government to react to outbreaks of violence in prisons and streets.
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